A Week Away

Adapter

In a week and one day Dale and I will be departing for London. This week I finished up my volunteering, which was sad. Bye, kindergarteners! And I drove my car one last time. It is now staying in my grandparents’ driveway for the year. I purchased basic storage insurance for $71.00 for the entire year from Sussex Insurance, and in their office filled out a couple “Letter of Authorization for Temporary Operation Permit” forms to give to Papa. This will give him permission to put temporary insurance on my car if he needs to move it or use it while I am away. Papa gave Dale some advice for whoever is taking care of his car as well:

1) Fill the tank with gas, then pour in a 946ml bottle of Sta-bil from Canadian Tire ($6)
2) Keep the tank full of gas throughout the year
3) Now and then run the car at least until the fan turns on
4) Move the car even slightly so that the tires don’t get flat spots
5) Check the tire pressure and fill them up accordingly

I successfully managed to unlock my Blackberry using freemyblackberry.com! It took 24 hours to get my unlock code and quite a bit of fiddling around with my phone’s settings, but it was free and all the necessary instructions were there. You can also rush your code for $3. I can now purchase a SIM card in Ireland and I won’t have to worry about getting a new phone, or roaming charges if I were to stick with my own provider!

Running errands this past week, Dale and I picked up blow-up neck pillows for the plane for $11.99 from Superstore. I think my neck injury will thank me. We bought a small bathroom kit for Dale. The cheapest adapters with a grounder (three prongs such as for laptops) that we found were from Superstore too. Weirdly enough, all of this was in a bathroom/travelling section. However, we bought our adapters from Futureshop for $21.99 because it allows you to use two plugs at once. For UK, not just continental Europe. We also bought a very, very cheap two-prong adapter from MTF Price Matters for $3.99, which was impressive since they are usually $10-16 at least. We looked into converters, but it seems our laptops will be able to convert the power on their own. They can handle 100-240 volts with the AC adapter (black box) that comes on their cords. The AC adapter works as a converter. Blackberrys also have built-in converters. Dale is trying to talk me out of taking my laptop in favour of sharing his actually decent laptop and his Tablet. I’m still thinking about it, but I like the sound of less luggage. And not having security ask me why my laptop is missing both corners—I dropped it a few times. Without a converter, I will probably not even be bringing my travel-sized hair straightener. We can’t figure out what voltage it accepts, and it was cheap anyway. Then we purchased earplugs and luggage locks for $1.25 each at the dollar store.

So what’s left? Re-packing my bag, carry-on, and purse a third time, last minute research on banking and what fees we are looking at, research on rail passes, booking our Dublin hostel for an unknown amount of time, and booking our Warner Brothers Studio Tour for the Harry Potter set in London! And maybe the walking tour as well. Oh, and we have to move Dale out his apartment and into my tiny bedroom! We gave away his couches already, and started moving some boxes this week. But there’s much more furniture still to go.

On top of all that, we have people to visit all week and my birthday on the weekend. Still, it’s not nearly as crazy as I thought it would be. I’m rarely even nervous and this is coming from someone who never, ever, planned to travel without a plan. I hope I haven’t spoken too soon.