Monday, August 3, 2009

Things haven't gone as planned..... :-(

Our apologies to all those who are following our blog due to the length of time between posts but we have been disappointed at how our events have played out recently. We have felt reluctant to post anything we haven't had much positive stuff to share.

Now thats out of the way I can get to the drama...

As Sal is still recovering from her hip surgery, we had to make a decision if it would be practical for us to travel for an intense 3 months as we first intended. Sal still being in a lot of pain and could bearly be on her feet for a couple of hours let alone all day - every day, it was clear that this was not going to happen... to our disappointment. So we cancelled our flights to Prague and applied for a refund on the Eurail tickets which we hope to be able to recover our losses from some of the cancellations with the insurance company.

We are now in the process of re-configuring our travel plans and have decided that I should start looking for work as we were burning through cash reserves quicker than budgeted and look at buying a car...... this is where everything gets interesting.

As Phil and Coreina (the friends that have graciously taken us in) have a Peugeot 406 diesel that was comfortable and great on milage - approx. +50MPG(miles per gallon) - we set out to purchase something similar. We ended up buying for £1,750 a 2003 Peugeot 406 diesel Hdi which would be fantastic on milage - approx. +60MPG. As we bought the car, the dealer dropped the key and the central locking stopped working so the dealer knocked £30 of the price so we could get it fixed(which turns out to be a bigger saga!). But before we could drive it away we needed to get the insurance sorted. The initial quote was around £600 pa which is bloody expensive!!! Well as we put the insurance in place, the guy on the phone recongised I was Aussie and wanted to double check some our initial details that we gave him. Due to a technicality the insurance company changed there initial quote from £600 to £1,100!!!!!!!! which was absolutely ridiculous. Thats like AU$2,200! just for one year! At the time we were contemplating to beg the dealer for our money back but in the end we decided to take the car home and try to find cheaper insurance which turned out to be impossible.

Less than a week after buying the car, we had to resort to using the key in the door in the meantime until we got the key fixed but all of a sudden the central locking stopped working all together! We got in touch with dealer to look into the problem to get it fixed which in turn would cost anything up to £400 to fix! At the this point we manage to strike a deal with the car dealer to get our majority or our cash back and give back the car!!! Hallelujah!

This time we decided to stick to what we knew and ended up buying the exact same car we had in Australia but in a diesel. This has proven to be a great move so far.!! Through Phil, we have found a chap who refines his own vege oil so we can bio diesel for less than what normal diesel costs around here.


Our new but old car...

From here we are looking at just travelling short trips around the UK until Sal improves. We have managed to get out to a few places which we will update you with soon. Hopefully with some more positive less dramatic experiences.

Tim




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