Change of plans

We had a call from our travel agent yesterday.

It seems that one of the coach tours we'd booked with Trafalgar has been cancelled, most likely due to lack of numbers. What annoys me about this is that we had to make sure we paid in full to get on the tour about three weeks ago. I assume that was the cutoff for the tour and no other bookings could be made after that. In which case, Trafalgar would have known three weeks ago that the tour wasn't viable and could have advised our travel agent then.

Our agent has suggested different dates for the two tours, but we've already made arrangements around the old dates and it would throw everything into disarray.

So what we've decided is, we're going to stick with our original timetable up to when we would have left for the second tour. That is, we head down to Dorset to stay with my aunt as soon as we arrive at Heathrow, then we head up to London for a night before doing a six day tour to Edinburgh and back. We've then got four days in London, which would have lead us into a seven day tour to Rome, this is the one that's been cancelled.

Instead we'll jump on the Eurostar to Paris, then use our Eurail pass for a leisurely tour around Europe for two weeks on the trains. We had intended to do that after arriving in Rome. We have a fifteen day pass, but would have probably only used it for about a week to see the places we didn't see on the tour.

Once we get back to England, we'll have time to see most of my family in Hertfordshire. Although, we don't know who we're staying with as yet, we're still looking for volunteers. Donna's looking forward to seeing where I was born and where I went to school.

Needless to say, I'm taking the laptop, my cameras and plenty of batteries and memory cards and I'll be blogging about the trip as much as I can while we're away. Donna will most likely do the same on her blog.

It seems that I've won a tour of the Cider Press, the best pub in Torquay as a result of correctly identifying a picture on Dave's blog. I do suspect however, that the odds were stacked in my favour. Dave knew I was going to be over that way soon and the picture in question was taken on the Gold Coast not far from here. We were going to meet up for a drink while Dave was over here on holidays, but I couldn't make it at the time. So there may be three people blogging about the same event.