Pre-Holiday Cockup
Following a trip to Luton this morning, John has now been reunited with his passport, which one of his mates took on a little detour to the Netherlands after picking it up from the windowsill. All EU passports look alike, and he had some of his stuff on the windowsill next to it, so these things happen. But his passport now lives in the moneybelt, along with mine and other important travel documents—as it should have done from the beginning.
Windowsill? Tchch…
Anyway, it means that we are no go to fly to Australia on the ninth, and with only a few days left, I am starting to make holiday preparations. Snorkels, masks and fins are present and correct, but seeing that we’ll be moving around, I’ll only take the mask and leightweight aquaboots (some of the nasties in the shallows sting). Flip-flops?—Check. Summer shirts, shorts etc?—Check. Suncream?—Airport. Sunglasses?
Flippin’ heck!
John has a pair of prescription sunglasses, but not me. It would be great to finally have sunglasses which I can see through, rather than just pose in. Every time I buy new specs, I get another pair for free or at a heavy discount, but they are only ever plain old glasses, never sunglasses.
It would have been so cool to have them for the Australia trip. However, they are extremely expensive, so I was delighted when I came across some online companies who sell no-frills versions for existing prescriptions, without insisting on another (premature) eye test or an eye test carried out by their own ophthalmologists (as if the others weren’t professional enough), or else piling on hidden surcharges for a bog-standard frame and lenses.
I ordered a pair straight away, but 3 weeks on, I’m still waiting. The glasses won’t arrive by the time we leave. Well, I should have thought of that earlier—what did I expect from a discount online retailer, over the Christmas period? I checked my email, but there wasn’t any notification that they had been despatched. That would be, because I have given them a spamgourmet address. So, should I query with them and reveal my real email address? What’s the point? Even if they’d send them straight away, the glasses wouldn’t get here on time.
Grrr.
Then it hit me: the cock-up isn’t their fault. At around the same time that I ordered the glasses, I also ordered a book from a small publisher (using my real email address) and when I checked with them, they said they had despatched the order the same week. —To Scotland.
Years ago, I signed up with PayPal in the vague hope of selling some travel articles online and thought no more of it, until I registered with Ebay after we moved to Tadley. Paypal would not accept payments through my bank account until I personally confirmed my address with them and they phoned me at home. From then on in, everything I have ever ordered through Ebay has always arrived in Tadley.
But Paypal never changed the address with which I registered (and promptly forgot about), and for some arcane reason, they think I still would like my non-Ebay purchases to be sent to Scotland, even though we now live 500 miles away.
Thanks, Paypal.
And yeah, I’ll go to the optician’s next time.
Tags: Australia, Packing, Preparations, Travel, Tag Index
Denni