July 26 Sel-see you later?

Head for Shropshire.  After Worcester go to Brockhampton Estate.  Note that we will NOT be following the Google maps route: after Worcester their instructions got rather like like pace notes for a car rally in a dense pine forest.  An alternate route using A-roads looked far more appealing (this judgement was confirmed by our host at Tugford).  

Last evening I went out to the garbage bin beside the front gate and found it empty!  We knew the truck had been by but were surprised to find they had grabbed it.  Perhaps this is because there is no pavement at the Cottage?  While thinking domestically I will comment on the cistern design in the downstairs dunny here.  It is set up with a basin on top and when you flush the water runs into the basin: thus the water with which you wash your hands becomes the next flush!  A great water saving idea.

Review of dog poo signs.

There have been various approaches to fishing noted around the area.  The beach/recreational folk all seem to use this tripod approach to cope with the shingle.  

The boat fisherman was lifting his crab pots.

 At Nutbourne (see below)  it was more like hunting – possibly worms?

A quick walk around the Bill produced Mediterranean Gulls – as soon as spotted one, quickly picked about 6 together with 20+ turnstones.

Pack up and nick off.  I tried to buy fuel at Selsey, as I knew service stations were scarce on the A/M27.  Half of the pumps not working and the folk at others all seem to be in shop, possibly buying stuff, possibly just yacking.  Pass, as I was sure we had enough to get somewhere willing to sell us petrol in less time than a glacial epoch.  Head off on A259 to a birding spot marked in our road atlas.  This was the  local Reserve of Nutborne Marsh.  There was much exposed mud!

If we had had more time and didn't mind getting mucky quite a few waders were visible in the distance.  However they stayed unidentifiable, but I did tick a Linnet beside the seawall.

Back to A27/M27 wherethe traffic was rather heavy.  Get to M3 and very very busy: I began to regret not getting somewhat more expensive fuel along the A259.  Turn off at Eastleigh and find fuel – very good price at a Tesco station.  The trouble is the place is also a mini-Tesco so punters buying stuff block pumps and then chat with check-out chicks.  Grr!  However, it was a long way to the next on-highway servo so I was glad we'd filled up when we did.

Back to the M3.  This was stop-start all the way (about 3 miles)  to the junction with the A34 which was completely clagged.  It appears this was due to an unnecessary cut down to one lane for a turn off to Basingstoke.  

However it then cleared up and it was flat as a maggot up towards the M4.  That lasted until more chaos due to a guy with tractor converting it to 1 lane by filling the kerbside lane at 30mph.  According to our host at Tugford the law is to pull over if have 10 behind you, which is fair enough: however this dude was mucking up 2-300 cars at least.  I presume if he'd driven out of the way on the shoulder Mr Plod would have been unhappy: just one more example of the country being beyond its design capacity.

M4 to Swindon was fine. The  A419 was also fine for many miles then suddenly it was cut down to 1 lane at Cowley and chaos resulted for the next 6 miles at 20mph.  We discussed who was to blame for these innane capacity changes and concluded that the problem is no-one is responsible: it is a worst case situation of mismanagement by committee.  Then onto to M5 which was very busy but OK to Worcester.  

This City began with briliant directions into the Cathedral and nearby parking.  Whoever is in charge of traffic planning in Worcester should run courses for just about every other city in the country.  

They also have a fabulous cathedral. 

It was holding a festival of young singers who were rehearsing when we arrived.  There were at least 300 of them being directed unto doing bell imitations.  Unlike many other places they still let punters in and the kids were doing a great job.

The stained glass was great.  

Here are a few other views of elements of the cathedral.

There were many war memorials (see thematic page for images of those I found more interesting).  Having taken many photos and forming a view that this was just about the best cathedral I've been in, I decided I should get a photo permit.  This cost £3 – as good a value as the Selsey bakery!  I also donated another £2 – they are doing a brilliant job.  

Their (quite restrained compared to many religious places) signs requesting donations said that it cost £3500 a day to maintain the place.  (They also said £5 a visitor, so on average they get 700 visitors a day – I need to think about whether this is a bigger number than I would have expected or not.)  I started to take note of the per capita costs listed in other churches etc: they are wildly variable!

They also had a memorial to Edward Elgar in the Cathedral but I took this photo of his statue in the square outside instead.  He is a big item around Worcester.

We found our way on to A49 (getting out of the city was not as easy as getting in but still much better signposted than many places: Lewes, East Sussex, I am looking at you!).  Hmm not exactly big road, but a lot bigger than the country lanes Google Maps suggested.  We didn't call in at Elgar's house Museum as we still had a way to go and some planned stops. 

We did call in to Brockhampton Estate (NT place). 

Very pleasant in a low key way.  1700 acres of tenanted land including lots of woodland

which we didn't have, nor feel like finding, the time to walk round.. 

On to Ludlow. A quick swing into Tescos  where the biggest surprise was all the vouchers we were given for future visits.  I managed to use these later in the trip saving (from memory) about £6.50. We then headed off into the lanes to the farm.  The most surprising aspect of this was the start of the B3465 which appears to go across the Ludlow race track: by this I mean that when a race was on the horses go across the road, which is presumably shut for the duration of the event!)

We met our hosts who seem most excellent people.  We also met their small dogs who are also excellent, despite being Jack Russells rather than Tenterfields.

Tonights Beer:  Malvern Hills Brewery Black Pear Premium Bitter.  Yep, that covers it rather well.  The hops end up sitting very nicely on the palate.  Another good beer!

I thought I would finish with some reflections on how Australian roads would be classified in the UK:

• The Hume Highway: definitely a Motorway when no at grade intersections.  Otherwise a 70 mph limited A road.
• The Kings Highway (Queanbeyan to Batemans Bay): definitely an A road.
• Captains Flat Rd:: well up to the standard of many A roads we found on this trip and with 1% of the traffic.
• Widgiewa and Whiskers Creek Rds: Both good B roads (higher capacity and better condition than the only road linking Selsey to the A27 or the one from Craven Arms to Bridgnorth.).
• I cannot think of an Australian road equivalent to the lanes around Tugford.  Some forest fire trails are as narrow but they are dirt surfaced.

Bird of the Day: Mediterranean Gull

Building of the day:  Worcester cathedral

Garden of the Day:  The avenue in Brockhampton Estate

Bad taste of the Day: Design of the intersection of the A34 and the M3

View of the Day: Nutborne Marsh. Tidal mud at its most magnificent

Back to the Index page

On the topic of airlines and air travel

When I first started planning this trip my intention had been to fly Emirates to Manchester as we did on the last trip.  However it seems that Emirates are no longer an economically rational airline.  Why is this so?  Could it be that having lined up with QANTAS they are taking instruction on client servicing from Buffoon O'Airline?

Whatever.  Plan B was to see what Expedia had to offer.  There was also some doubt about whether we needed to go through Manchester.  The only reelly reelly important thing was to avoid the world's worst airport (OK perhaps second worst - there is probably one in some regional centre of a small African country that is worse).  The key part of our trip was in Shropshire which is close to Birmingham (hereafter Brum as the natives call it) so I explored flights to that fine airport.  Expedia gave me a clue that KLM were the way to go having various flights to Brum.

I also wanted to stay the first night in Birmingham to have a look at that city and ensure we are in reasonable shape for the drive South.  So, on Saturday 9 February, I thought I would also book a hotel through Expedia.  Unfortunately doing the Hotel+flight option turned out that everything was driven by the choice of hotel (Wag that dog!) and one of the flights by KLM that looked particularly useful, due to being 4-7 hours shorter than any other, wasn't listed.

So back to the KLM site.  I was able to choose the flights I wanted and by doing an online bank transfer (Westpac Payanyone is fantastic) avoided the $60 slug involved with credit cards.  I also decided to reserve a couple of seats on the Kuala Lumpur - Amsterdam leg so that we stood a chance of getting some kip there.    That was going to cost me $165 each but whatever.  Then we got to the payment and it seemed to get to the checkout phase OK.  However

1. I couldn't seem to get it to charge me for the special seats;
2. their client service area wasn't open on a Saturday or a Sunday; and
3. there was some requirement to finalise all of this by Sunday!

Checking back to another part of the KLM site it appeared we had reserved the seats I wanted so I sent the money off - to some collection agency (Global Collect NV - presumably the NV stands for Nasty Violence, suggesting what will happen if you don't cough up).

So on Monday I rang KLM and it turns out that the payment situation was fine, but it will take 5 -7 days for Global Collect to send the cash to KLM.  At that point the tickets will be issued and I can ring KLM again to sort out payment for the seats.  The nice lady at KLM then asked if I wanted to reserve seats for other legs and was able to do it all except for the leg from Amsterdam to Guangxhou.  So we have a row of two from Guangxhou to Sydney, which is when I would really like to get some sleep.  Basically KLM end up getting a bouquet.

Interestingly, in looking up the link above for Global Collect I found that I could check on my bank transfer and it was rated as "In process" which is promising.  That is about the first time I have found one of these status check items to be of any help!

In rather less than 5 days I found a couple of e-tickets appeared in my email.  They mentioned nothing about the $330 I owed them so I rang KLM speaking to a very pleasant person with a Gallic accent.  He could help me out for $177.80 per seat!  I said what about the $165? There was then much fussing with him saying $177.80 was the go and me saying $165, but to his credit he nicked off- with me on hold -  and found it was on the web site for $165 so did something and made it so.  It took 45 minutes to save $25.60, so bad economics but good for my self esteem.!

Three days before we were due to depart I got an officious email from KLM stating they had to provide Advanced Passenger Information to the Poms.  Presumably to allow the police to alert News Limited to our impending arrival.  "Evenin' all."  This is annoying as the information that was shown as required came to name, age sex, citizenship and country of residence, all of which could have been collected at ticket purchase time.  However to get to that one had to go through three screen of KLM advertising.  Definitely Buffoon O'Airline style customer service!  They also had some optional fields for passport information but that:

• seemed rather like sending ones credit card information over an unsecured link;and
• I bet we still have to produce them about 5 times on the flight so thi would just make life easier for someone in KLM

so I passed on that but wished I had a Shillelagh in my hand and the Buffoon in range.

The fun continues.  The day before departure I got an email from KLM inviting me to check in on-line.  So I try to do so and get a screen saying I can't check in online.  One of the items you have to complete is the departure airport and it doesn't include Sydney in the pick list!!  Then I try to ring KLM and get told that they are open from 9am.  They are going to get a call which will pin their ears back a tad.

Here we go again!

A niece is getting married in late July and she and her fiance have decided to have the wedding in the UK, his origin, and where they met.  We have been invited and are planning to attend.

The first step was to find ourselves some accommodation close to the venue of the wedding.  This is to be Acton Scott an historic farm in the general vicinity of Shrewsbury.  It is at 'A' in this clip.

Having the date and venue of the main event fixed we decided the first thing to do was to book some accommodation nearby.  A general issue with this is that Visit Britain - a Government funded body, which we used on our previous visit - is no longer allowed to produce its listing of accommodation.  Instead one has to use private sector "equivalents".  I have put quotes around the word equivalent because of Flabmeister's Law:

If any public service is privatised a lower quality outcome will be achieved.

Typically the service will provide:

• a lower level of user satisfaction (because the key stakeholder is the owners of the service not the end user); and
• cost the end user more (because the price charged has to include a profit for the owners).

a musical interlude

.>

A  couple of attempts to use some of the equivalents which I found were hopeless. So when we noticed that cottages were part of the Acton Scott Estate portfolio that looked like a good idea.  Then Frances read the site more closely and realised that the place was intended to be an historic experience - specifically the epoch before electricity!  Pass!!  She then came up with English Country Cottages which seemed reasonable.  At least it offered a few places more or less in the vicinity of where we wished to go.  (The owners of this brand - see below - talk about 20,000 properties but that includes all their places in Europe and from memory Visit England had about 60,000.) It didn't appear to be ordered in a logical sequence and certainly not by proximity to the selected target location.

Whatever.  We found a place that looked good: Trap Cottage, Tugford.  So we start to book. Under the Visit Britain deal this was a transaction with the owners of the venue and could be undertaken by an exchange of emails.  That is far too convenient.  Under this deal (where English Country Cottages is a brand of the Hoseasons Group which is a subsidiary of a US firm Wyndham Worldwide) one has to use their booking system.

(A parenthesis about Hoseasons.  This name seemed familiar and when I looked them up for this post I found that they started as major agents for Norfolk Broads boat rentals.  Their website claims that they initiated many developments in UK travel including the first online booking system (in 1999).  Website design has moved on a lot since then.  As will be apparent from what follows I suspect that this site has watched the parade stream by - note also the Law mentioned above.) 

The website wasn't too bad until, on the payment page I noticed a typo I had made in our address.  I have found that online systems can get grumpy when the stated address doesn't match the address attached to the credit card so went back to correct it.  I then returned to the 'Payment page and found nothing worked.  It appears it had made the booking for me and now thought I was making a duplicating booking.   I couldn't find an email address to query this (welcome to the 21st Century, big innovators) and didn't feel like phoning the UK to sort it.  Let us see what happens.

Next step was an email from Hoseasons saying they needed more information to complete the booking and if I hadn't called them by 3pm the next day they would cancel the booking.  I wonder if they can spell Kustoma Cervis?  The email gave their working hours including 10 -4 on Sundayof which the most convenient was 10pm on the following night.  So I rang them.

Straight into a pick a choice system.  I chose not to take "amend a booking" as I didn't think I had a booking and very shortly had a voice tell me that they didn't work on a Sunday.!  Not happy!!  Try again choosing the amend a booking option and get through to someone who sounds a lot like Ringo Starr.  Unlike Ringo, who just sounded thick, this guy was really confused over what to do as the people I needed to talk don't work on Sunday.  Eventually - I was paying for the phone call, so no need to rush - he worked out to transfer me to his supervisor.  Keeping up the musical links, she sounded just like Janice Nicholls from "Thank your Lucky stars" even though she didn't pronounce the number between 4 and 6.  She said she'd send a confirming email (thus far it hasn't arrived, but the time is still booked out, so I am hopeful).

The email confirmation did eventually appear: in my Spam folder!  But anyway we are on the right track.  So far Hoseasons have not provided details on how to get to the property, just the name and phone number of the owner,  Why do these people rely on the phone so much?  Are they daft or do do they have lots of equity in British Telecom?  Fortunately Google comes to the rescue!

We have ended up booking two cottages with them, primarily because no-one else looked any better.  The second one is at Selsey near Chichester and will serve as a base for exploring the South Coast, after a night in Birmingham when we first arrive.

I have called Hoseasons twice and each time have been able to sort of resolve the issue.  On the last call I was given an email address to use but that has failed left, right and, as one might expect, centre.  Actually what seems to have failed left, right and, as one might expect, centre, is my transcription of the email address: read on.   I found a query section on their website so used that to ask them to give me an email address for the caretaker of the place at Selsey since we need to contact them before departure and phone calls cost too much.  They didn't have an email address but offered to pass on a message which offer  I have taken up.  They also offered her mobile number as a fall back, so a few brownie points - not quite a bouquet yet - to Hoseasons.

Guide to the 2010 trip to the UK on this blog

This blog is likely to get a tad large and some folk may wish to only read certain topics: some may wish to focus on the buildings others on the birds or the beer.  I could handle this by developing a site map but I think it would look rather like this summary of the Pentagon's plan for success in Afghanistan:

As an alternative I am going to follow two strategies.

1. The broad set up of the blog is 
1. series of posts dealing with plans and preparations; followed by 
2. a more or less traditional blog which I hope to update on a daily basis while travelling; and concluding with
3. a set of summaries of the major topics of beer buildings and birds and other stuff which arises and that I consider is worth summarising.
2. Much use of labels to enable people to focus on topics containing stuff relevant to their topics of interest.  The topics will all be listed in a sidebar.

Plans, plans and more plans

This blog is going to cover our trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (thanks to a reader for pointing out the correct appellation) in 2010.  Before getting to the plans let us deconstruct that country name:

• Britain: OK, although the Britons as a genetic identity probably died out a couple of millenia ago.
• Great: once, certainly.  Now is more dubious.
• Kingdom: Why isn't it a Queendom?
• United: The place contains England (OK that wants to stay); Northern Ireland (about half the population wants to stay, even though they have got a separate mention); Wales (got their own Parliament and see N Ireland); Scotland (see Wales); Isle of Man (happy to stay as long as they don't pay taxes) and the Channel Islands (last time I checked they are two States and they are only in it for Foreign Affairs and a cheap army - see Isle of man  but the Channellers probably would rather be French).

The big picture of planning was that the trip was to involve touring Gothic Cathedrals and birding sites.  The driver of the process was the cathedrals, following the success of a tour of this nature around L'Ile de France in about 1997.  There are pages about those attributes elsewhere as linked.  This left us three things to book:

1. Flights;
2. Accommodation; and
3. Rental Car.

There seemed to be no real difficulty with flights so I thought the first thing to do was the accommodation in the UK.
Accomodation
This was made relatively easy by Frances finding the Enjoy England website.  Indeed the only problem with the site was sorting out the plethora of places they had on offer.  We ended up selecting three places as looking rather good:

• Ingleby Manor (North Yorkshire);  
• The Coach House (Norfolk) and 
• Beanacre Barn (Somerset).  

Is it not astonishing that each of these places is not only part of an internet based travel booking system but has its own website.  If only the banking system was as good!

We changed our mind a couple of times about the order to visit them, with that shown being the 1st selection and the final one after the Barn couldn't take us for the second week.  I wondered about doing the West Country first but it turned out the Glastonbury Festival was on that week which seemed to make it likely that part of the UK is going to be full of punks and junkies.  Thus we ended up as shown.

All three property owners seemed most excellent in terms of being very responsive and helpful to us (and it might be noted from the end of the trip they continued those traits even after meeting me).  Getting the three places organised took us about a five days elapsed time with Martin putting in perhaps 2 hours contact time.

The only issue was generated by the banks.  It appears that to send money to an account in Europe it is necessary to use an International Bank Account Number (IBAN).  This seems to identify the bank, the branch and the account.  Thus get rid of all the other crap about names etc.  Not for WESTPAC. (I have put in the link in the hope that all readers of this page send that company some email advice!)

Having seen the array of stuff they seemed to require for an on-line transfer (most of which I didn't have, and the one bit I did have contradicted info on the Westpac site) I decided to go for a serviced transfer. That got kiboshed because the teller needed the address of the Bank in England.  So I sent an email to the owners seeking this info.

Then I got an email from another property which looked as though it should work - even though the IBAN contradicted the WESTPAC advice - because it told me they were dealing with the Royal Bank of Scotland.  On doing this online it emerged that all that was really needed was enough detail to identify which of an array of bank names were to be used.  It seems that WESTPAC deal with Royal Bank of Scotland under a range of situations and they all have different SWIFT codes.  The only one that looked sensible referred to transfers so I picked that and it generated a SWIFT code.  There was no need to know the address at all.

So, back to situation 1.  The problem was that the info from the owners didn't include the name of the bank.  The appearance of the letters MIDL suggested 'Midland Bank' but that was taken over by HSBC some years ago.  So I googled GB69MIDL and up popped 4 webpages.  One of them, the membership page for the European Museum indicated the Bank name was none other than HSBC.  So I included that and again got a list of possible bank names: most of these looked fronts for the Corleone Family or the source of letters advising me that I had won a squillion dollars in a lottery I had never entered; however buried in the middle of it was "HSBC all British Branches" which looked to fit the bill.

What a palaver for something so simple.  The offending mob of idiots got a nice email pointing out the problems with the system.

A linguistic aside: in the old days 'bank-robber' referred to someone who robbed banks.  These days it is probably used as much to identify the banks as a subset of robbers!

AIRFARES

In early research I had found that Emirates was back being a cheap airline and one of those that flew directly into Manchester (a key driver of this process being to avoid Heathrow).  I very quickly found flights that matched our requirements and set about booking the flgihts.

Suddenly I found myself back at the WESTPACsite filling in something from Mastercard Secure "to ensure my security".  Having mentioned the s-word you can probably see that this is not going to be happy.  Sure enough the screen clears and I am told to contact my Emirates Office.  GRRRRRR!

So I ring Emirates and it turns out that the problem was that I hadn't registered with Mastercard Secure before starting the process.  Never having heard of this service before it was hardly surprising I hadn't registered with them.  The good thing about this was that the young lady taking the booking requested nice seats etc for us. 

Back to westpac, on the phone, with a whole lotta short, Anglo Saxon, words in my mind.  Their starting point was that only some companies use the Mastercard secure 'service' so it isn't really part of their system.  (ie it is Emirates fault.)  To get me registered, to prevent a recurrence of this lunacy, we search the WESTPAC site for Verified by VISA!!  I pointed out to the young lady - a different one, but also nice - that I used a Mastercard she said "Yes, but if you search for that you won't get to the right place."  The short, Anglo Saxon words got almost past my teeth!  After 17 minutes we had finished the exercise: as I commented to the young lady, I hope someone was recording the call so that they realised how appalling the system is.

Car rental

We decided this didn't have to be done for a while, so it wasn't.

Google Earth images

As we have been planning away I have been recording the places we want to visit on a Google Earth file in the hope that I'll be able to transfer it to my netbook and refer to it while away.  This post is to provide the ultimate back up of the images.

Things that can stuff plans

Ash clouds

We decided that we would avoid Heathrow Airport as though it had developed mutated, extra-virulent, bubonic plague.  Everyone we have spoken to reckons this is good strategy.  So we are flying in to Manchester (it is also close to North Yorkshire).

Stone the sanguinary corvids!  Today ( 15 April 2010) flights into the UK are basically cancelled left right and centre due to volcanic ash from bloody Iceland.  Just under 50% of flights into Manchester - and a much higher percentage of those earlier in the day - get cancelled  First the cod wars; then their banking crisis and now they shovel ash into the way of tourists flying into the UK!

I hope this is well resolved by mid June!  The latest stuff  (10 May) seems to be that a fair chunk of Western Europe (France Spain Portugal, Ireland ) have shut down their airspace because of a new cloud.   Oh well, 6 weeks to go.  By May 17 Manchester Airport was stuffed (hopefully for a brief while).

Thailand does military rule!
To add to the entertainment the Red Shirts and the military in Thailand seem to be getting rather antsy.  From a selfish point of view one hopes they keep the action away from the airport.  From many other points of view one hopes they actually take a good hard look at themselves and realise that what is going on is crap.  But they're all politicians so that sentence is extremely naive.

Wireless Internet access

We acquired a netbook last year so that I cold record things while we were in Peru.  It did a pretty good job, but of course nowhere in Amazonas had electricity worth speaking of, let alone wireless internet!  A problem appeared to arise that it couldn't connect to our home wireless connection,  giving weird LINUX error messages about 'receiving offers' and 'persistent databases'.

After spending a lot of time in e-contact with a very helpful LINUX guru and phoning an ex-ABS contact I was still a bit in the dark.  Thus I invoked IT Rule 1: flail about at random enough and you will eventually fix the problem.  It emerged that somehow a password had been deleted.  I replaced it and Bingo!  I have now tested it at the National Library and it all looks good!

As at least 2 of our hosts offer wireless access that will be a great outcome.

Navigation
We won't bother with a fancy in-car GPS jobbie.  I reckon it would take us 3 weeks to learn how to program it!  My version of Linux doesn't as yet link to Google Earth but we have printed off some directions from Google Maps to get us between the main accommodation places (and to/from Manchester Airport).