The last leg

Well, nearly there with my travel journey. So at Banbury Uncle David
picked me up and whisked me away to the house he shares with Ilona.
And four dogs. It's in the middle of the countryside, and he has 80
head of sheep and 2 horses to keep the grass down. Very nice old
house, and it has a spectacular view over a valley whose name I don't
know. But it was where the Battle of Edge Hill was fought, which may
mean something to someone. Here's a very brief view of the valley from
the top room of the house.

One of the things before I left was that I wasn't sure if I still had a job lined up. When I was finally able to check my mail in Antequera I found out that yes, I did have a job and I started Monday as previously arranged. For those who have been keeping track of days (which is hard as I haven't said which day is which, we're up to Saturday evening. So really, not much chance to get over the jet lag as I was now staying one night there, and then had to get to Warrington. Sorted out a B&B to stay at while getting organised up there, and as Uncle David and Ilona were going to Birmingham, caught a train from there to Warrington. And from there I caught a taxi to the B&B (very prosaic I know). It wasn't a London style cab, as I wasn't in London. I did see a few of them and I will get a photo of them when I'm down there.

Since I was going to be living in the area for a while, I thought I'd take a wander around and see what's what. It is a very English town, canals and all.

So on Monday, I got up and had a typical English breakfast, sausage, egg, bacon and mushrooms. But when I turned up at work they didn't have a computer for me to do any work with, so basically I just met the guys in the office and then headed into town to sort out stuff like somewhere to live and money. Where I came across the first major hurdle. You cannot get money out in England with a credit card unless you have a pin number. Which I didn't know about until I got here. Luckily HSBC let me open an account without needing an address, so I've got that sorted. What I didn't have was any money. Most places will still accept a credit card to swipe to pay for goods and services so it wasn't like I was going to starve. I sorted out a mobile number so I could actually call people if needed, so I got the important things done. Apart from finding somewhere to live. To actually put an application in on a place to rent costs money and is non-refundable. So that put me off living somewhere on my own. So I found (read: was told of ) a good website (gumtree.com) to use to find somewhere to live, and that worked out nicely. So now it's been over a week since I've been in Warrington (or Wazza, as some people call it) and everything is coming together nicely. It does however take me 50 minutes to walk to work so I will need to purchase a bike. Or a scooter. I haven't investigated how much it will cost to own/run a scooter yet, so I haven't decided. I'm not too certain I want to drive on the roads around here, but I don't think I've got much choice in the matter.

I'm living in Great Sankey (what a wonderful name) with two girls whose names are Claire and Lauren. On the way to work I need to cross the Mersey River and the Sankey Canal. Yesterday when I walked past the canal there was a coke can resting on the top of the canal. It wasn't floating. That may have just been that stretch of it, and maybe this rain today will flush out all the algae. I doubt it though. On Thursday I'm heading off to Liverpool to get a National Insurance Number (something like a tax file number, but with more uses) so a) I pay less tax (I hope) and b) can use a hospital if I need to.

So now I've got the trip blogs out of the way, normal service can resume. I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to mention again that I'm using a mac at work. Sure it's a mac mini with only 512 meg of ram, but it's cool. I'm not used to all the little sounds it makes, and my phone doesn't work to well with it (I removed all the photos from it, but the phone doesn't seem to think so) but it's so tiny! I have started converting to the dark side now (or white side)
and I'm loving it. Just need to get me a macbook now and my journey will be complete. It'll be useful for the train journeys and organising photo's.

Anyway, I hope everyone reading got a brief idea of what it was like on my journey. Stay tuned for more exciting stories in the future. Liverpool, Blackpool, Manchester and London are on the list for future travels before heading overseas. Should be good. Hope Australia is treating you all well, I'll write more when I have more news :)