More Marvelous Misadventures

Current events first:

Steve, Caleb, Lynette, Nancy, Alan, Cindy, Connor, & Jarrett have all loaded into Alan's rented MPV (minivan) and are headed to Stonehenge and Portsmouth today. I'm staying here with the girls. My plans for the day include catching up on the blog, tidying up the house a bit, doing some laundry, and going to the grocery store. Steve traded in our MPV yesterday for another van. We now have a Chrysler Grand Voyager. As bare-bones as the Toyota was, this one is decked out. Leather seats, automatic side and rear doors, stow & go seating (the seats fold down into the floor), captains chairs on the second row, tinted windows, parking assistance (I'll have to investigate this option), seat warmers, multi cd-changer. This is the van we needed when we went to Scotland. Oh well. We have it now and Steve is very pleased. He's sure he can fit all of our junk into it when it's time to go to the airport to go home. Plus we only need to make sure there's 1/8 tank of gas when we return it. He likes that.

Yesterday was weird. We had 2 things we had to get done, then we were planning on going to Stonehenge and Portsmouth. We had to get Cindy & Alan's rental car, then they needed to get a cell phone. It took 3 hours to get their vehicle due to a mix-up with the rental agreement. They specifically requested an automatic, but when National Rental got the request, there was nothing about an automatic, so they were put in a standard. So you might be thinking, "why didn't they just switch them into an automatic?" ... easier said than done. All the vehicles they had (with the exception of the teeny tiny compacts) were manual. The lady helping them called the national National office and discovered that there was a van at the Reading branch that was an automatic. Apparently it had just been returned and the lady didn't know it. So it turns out that they got exactly what they wanted, but then they had to wait for it to be processed. So it was about 1 1/2 hours until they found the van there where we were and another 1 1/2 hours to process it, get them in it, and then get them back here to the house.

Now for the cell phone. We split into 2 groups for this bit. Steve, Cindy, Lynette & Nancy got in our van to go to Enterprise to switch the Toyota for the Chrysler, and Alan, all the kids, and I got in their van and went to downtown Reading to the mall. The plan was for Steve to swap vans then head over there and meet us. By the time we got the phone and met up with the other group, it was around 3 p.m. None of the adults had eaten lunch and the kids had eaten a little meal earlier, so we invaded Chili's and had tea. We had to explain to Jarrett that "tea" doesn't necessarily mean a cup of hot tea and a biscuit. It can mean that or it can mean a small snack or a full-blown meal. It's just in between lunch and dinner.

Then we wandered around the mall after Chili's. We decided that trying to go anywhere else to sight see was pretty much pointless at this late hour. Both of my big kiddos had some money burning holes in their pockets, so we went to the toy store while Cindy and Connor were clothes shopping. Each kid had about £10. Caleb ended up with 3 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines and Audrey got 2 princess ballerina Barbies (Belle from "Beauty and the Beast" and Sleeping Beauty).

I just remembered that I need to be working on some wire transfers for our rent, so I'm going to sign off for now and hopefully get the rest of our Paris misadventures posted later this afternoon.