So, our flight out of Toronto left at 9pm with a 1hr stop over in Montreal. With the time change, flight time, and the stop over, we arrived in London at about 10am (London time). I think I slept about 3hrs on the plane, it only lasted that long because there was a Canadian rugby team sitting in the same section…. they decided it would be fun to not sleep all night and continually kick my chair.
When we landed, we had arranged to pick up our car rental at National/Alamo rentals…. We had thought that it was paid for however, it turned out that we had an unexpected cost of having to pay for insurance ($500 on top of the rental)… With this sudden change of events, I was forced to supply my credit card to cover the cost, which basically ate up my entire personal budget for this trip ($1000 dollars).
This was fine, the guys recognize that I spent all my money, and are helping me pay for stuff, also, we’re splitting up the money we make at our shows so we can eat/sleep/drink.
Our first night in London was spent at a hostel called St. Christopher’s Inn.. very near London and Tower bridge, right in the heart of the London tourist area. We proceeded to enjoy our first night in the city by joining a pub crawl that was arranged by the staff at the hostel. Its a cool way to meet people, get to see some places around the city, and drink a bit. It turns out that during our jaunt around the little part of the city that we were doing, moe was carrying our car keys on his belt loop on a carabina hook.. the kind you buy at a dollar store that mimics the kind that rock climbers use. Well, it turns out that someone decided they didn’t like Moe, and apparently tried to start a fight with him. I didn’t see it, but he said he just walked away and didn’t further the confrontation.
Later that night, Moe realized that his carabina containing his keys and our car keys had gone missing.
Since then, we’ve been in this incredible loop of trying to find money. National/Alamo car rental wont recognize the theft of the key as “theft” and refuse to cover it. We’ve had to order a new set of keys, since they dont keep a spare. This would have been fine, however, its a bank holiday here (good friday), and everything is shut down… So our situation has been worsened. We had to rent another car so that we could, pick up gear, and drive to the first gig of the tour in Brighton (which we barely made because we got lost a few times in London, plus the rediculous traffic). It took us 6 hours to drive the distance that should have taken 2.
We’re now in Cardiff, and things seem to be getting better.. We have the 2nd car here and are driving up to Manchester to catch our flight to Dublin for the weekend. at that point we’re going to drop off the new rental, so we’re only paying for one car rental.