Travel Tips, or What We Would Have Done Differently

Looking back on the trip to England, most of our plans worked out exceedingly well. Where we stayed, how we got around, the things we did -- almost everything went so smoothly. A good deal of this is thanks to Rick Steves' guidebook, London 2002 (thank you again for the recommendation, Lucy!).

There are only three things we probably would do differently if we had it all to do over again.

• We would have used ATMs instead of traveller's checks. Last time I was in England, in 1988, ATMs were not nearly as common as they are now, and I don't remember ever using one to get pounds from my American bank account. But that is extremely easy to do these days, and the exchange rate we got from ATMs was better than the one we got from the actual American Express offices when changing AE travellers checks into pounds sterling. Plus the ATMs are almost everywhere, while the American Express offices are few and far between.
  
  Of course you can change money anywhere, especially in London, but the rates can be very bad. Banks and change bureaus also tend to charge service charges, etc. If we'd known how convenient the ATMs were, we wouldn't have brought any traveller's checks at all.
  
  
• We would have bought another suitcase. In 1988 I sent several boxes home during the summer, full of things I had bought or things I wouldn't be needing anymore. (That summer started off with me in school, and ended with me backpacking in Europe, so I didn't need my dress-up clothes anymore at the end of the trip, and I sent them home.) I don't remember the postage being exorbitant, but it's been a long time and maybe I've just forgotten.
  
  On this trip, I brought a smaller, collapsible suitcase inside my big bag so we'd have something to carry our extra purchases in. But we ended up buying more than would fit in the bag (being addicted to books can do that to you). So we decided to ship some of our stuff home on the last day we were there, and it turned out to be pretty expensive. If we'd realized how much it would cost to mail, it would have made more sense to just buy another inexpensive suitcase and pay any overweight luggage charges at the airport. But by the time we realized it, we were already in the Post Office and we were leaving in a couple of hours... so we went ahead and mailed the stuff. Next time, a new suitcase. It would have been cheaper than what we paid to mail things home, and we could have used it on our next trip.
  
  
• We would have avoided the hair-dryer trauma. This one is mostly mine. I got a new hairstyle a few weeks before our trip, which requires me to dry my hair with a diffuser. So I made sure I had a converter and a hair dryer that was graded for use with the converter before we left (I had to buy a new hair dryer for this because the wattage on my regular one was too high). I brought the dryer, the diffuser, and the converter. But in London, the electrical outlets in our hotel room were configured so that the converter wouldn't plug into them. (The outlets were right at floor level, and the converter had to plug in and hang down from there, so of course there was no room for it to fit.) Huh.
  
  So on our first day in London we went off down Oxford Street and bought an extension cord (after much looking, time that could have been spent on something else). Then I could plug the dryer in and use it, hooray. Well, it worked the next day, and then it never worked again. When we got home we found that the dryer had blown out somehow -- it wouldn't work here either -- but at the time we didn't know what was causing the problem.
  
  The upshot was I went the entire week with my hair looking like a mess. I got used to it pretty fast, and just let it go. But this problem has two fixes. First of all, I could have just bought a dryer when I got to England. It wasn't worth it for me to do this after my dryer from home blew out, because I'd already spent so much on the converter, the dryer to go with the converter, and the extension cord. But if I hadn't already spent all that time and money on it, just buying a dryer would have made sense. I could have just left it with my friends at the end of the trip, or brought it home to save for my next trip to England. (In 1988, I bought a curling iron when I arrived, and used it all summer. It worked out great.)
  
  The other solution, of course, would have been to not get this high-maintenance hairstyle. Ah well. Live and learn.

I figure, if those are the only things we'd do differently out of nine days of travel in a foreign country, we did pretty damn good. The rest of it all went swimmingly, thanks to our planning and the extreme thoughtfulness of our hosts. And probably a little bit of luck, as well.