Brits, generally speaking, plan further ahead than I do. It\u2019s August, and we just got an email offering us a discount on this year\u2019s Christmas Tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No joke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a result, despite having gone through the effort of getting my driving license a couple years back, we nearly never hire a car. We\u2019ll wake up, think \u201cit might be a nice day to go somewhere,\u201d and discover that there are no available rental cars unless we want to start the journey by trekking to the other side of London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d been trying to solve this for a while without success, and finally decided to give in and buy a car. Turns out there aren\u2019t too many car dealers in central London, and that means the time honored American tradition of wandering between a bunch of dealerships to look at and test-drive cars isn\u2019t really done here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buying a car involves (you\u2019re probably way ahead of me) some planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One Saturday afternoon, a couple weeks ago, we wandered over to the BMW\/Mini dealer at the edge of Hyde Park, thinking we\u2019d have a look at a couple possibilities. We discovered that (a) they expect you to have an appointment and (b) they don\u2019t keep any used inventory on-site. One of the sales staff was between appointments and free to chat with us briefly, so we talked about what they had in used inventory, looked at new versions of a few of those things, but it was not – all in all – a terribly useful visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and it turns out most car dealers are closed on Sundays. Maybe there was a rule that forbade buying horses on a Sunday, or maybe they just like the day of rest more than they like money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At any rate, I spent some time on-line and found a few interesting cars in different parts of the country, but I wasn\u2019t willing to travel several hours to probably not buy something. I eventually found a couple candidates relatively close by – \u201conly\u201d a little over an hour away in East London. I emailed the dealerships to arrange to come out the next weekend, but by the time the weekend had arrived both cars I was interested in had been sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back to the proverbial drawing board\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I found another candidate, I wasted no time. It turns out that if you give the dealer a couple hundred pounds, they\u2019d hold a car for you for a few days. And if you decide it isn\u2019t the right car, they\u2019ll happily give those pounds back. So I handed them some money and blocked out time to go see the car in a couple days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was after something with a sunroof, since I couldn\u2019t justify buying a convertible without having a garage, and had found a late model VW Golf that looked good on paper. We had a look, took a test drive, and talked to the dealer about the particulars, ultimately deciding it fit the bill nicely. We signed the paperwork and planned to take delivery on the coming Saturday, after a final inspection and detailing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saturday morning we took the train to the dealership in West Hampstead, did the last bits of paperwork, and drove away in our \u201cnew\u201d car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since we were already most of the way there, our first stop was IKEA, and then Costco where, for the first time since moving here, we could buy heavy things (like wine) without needing to carry our purchases home on the Tube in a backpack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning we took a drive through and out of London to the south east, meeting up with friends at Bateman\u2019s<\/a> – the former home of Rudyard Kipling. After a visit to the house and gardens, and a bite of lunch, they went home and Dawnise and I made a stop at Scotney Castle<\/a> en route back to London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along with the actual purchase I had to sort out insurance – more expensive as I\u2019ve only been licensed for 3 years, and have no prior UK insurance. Oh, and get a resident parking permit. And pay the \u201croad tax\u201d (registration). And register for congestion charging – just in case we have cause to drive into the congestion zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So now we have a car, and I expect we\u2019ll find places to wander that were formerly inaccessible, or inconvenient, by train. Being accustomed to mass transit basically always being slower and less convenient than a car I have to remember to check, and not assume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I look forward to the day when we think \u201cmaybe we should sell the car, we don\u2019t drive it very often.\u201d Until then, I look forward to having spontaneous access to more places outside London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brits, generally speaking, plan further ahead than I do. It\u2019s August, and we just got an email offering us a discount on this year\u2019s Christmas Tree. No joke. As a result, despite having gone through the effort of getting my driving license a couple years back, we nearly never hire a car. We\u2019ll wake up, … Continue reading “The Road Rushing Under My Wheels”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-calling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1531,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/1531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oubliette.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}