Going To Collect New Car

I managed to set up insurance for our new car, by ringing up the company on Friday morning who arranged insurance for  the Hyundai, Swinton. It was a simple matter of transferring it to the new car, although for some reason I assumed the insurance policy on that car ran out at the end of this month and was surprised that it ran until the end of October.

This morning (actually Carol's birthday, by the way.) we cleared out the Hyundai. It's shocking to find so much rubbish in the car, which we soon put in black bin bags for the collection on Wednesday. We had to put £5-worth of petrol  at the Shell station in Grafton Street, which was sufficient to get us to Dunstable and then  we went into  the NatWest bank in  Milton Keynes city centre which didn't open until 9, parked the  outside and went in to take the money out of our account to pay for the new car. We had found that, had we paid using our debit card as we had done to pay the deposit on the car on Thursday evening, we would have incurred a £15 charge which we wanted to avoid.  Having left the bank we decided that, as it was too early to go direct to Dunstable, we would go to Dobbie's garden centre in Fenny Stratford, and not too much out of our way as it's on the A5 en route to Dunstable, and had coffee and cake in their restaurant and wandered around the garden centre to fill in time as the car dealer in Dunstable wasn't going to be open until 10.30. We drove on down the A5 and just as we got into Dunstable we found the road blocked ahead of us by a vast traffic jam but fortunately we turned off into Frenchs Avenue which was where the car dealer was, thus avoiding being held up. On arrival there we found the place was very busy with a lot of cars parked in the road outside In the yard where the cars were on display a lot of people  were viewing cars. On enquiring about our car we were told that it was out being test-driven. They had taken it to be MoT'd elsewhere and it was apparent that it was stuck somewhere in the town amongst the traffic jam we had seen as we'd come into Dunstable. We had to wait in the office for around 20 minutes. Fortunately during this time we were able to hand over the cash and sort out the paper-work that was required including setting up, on-line, payment of the car licence which we can pay in monthly installments which seems to be a recent development and mans we don't have to fork out a further fairly hefty amount of cash in one lump. Having done the paperwork we were then told our car had been bought back so we could take it away, but we then found that it had been parked in such a way that it was extremely difficult to get it out so a good gentleman who was waiting in his car got it out for us. Carol then got in to drive home and we had to go out slowly and steadily as it is a good deal bigger than the Hyundai. We got out on to the main road out and stopped at the petrol station at Chalk Hill to fill up. Unfortunately I went to open the passenger-side door to manually open it when we were getting back in. The car has automatic, sliding, doors and you have to use the remote on the electronic key and not open the doors manually. As I'd opened it by hand my passenger-side door kept opening and closing because it had become 'confused.' But eventually it closed properly and we were able to drive off down the A5 back to Milton Keynes. We had to return home as we needed to get the re-usable shopping bags so we could go shopping in Sainsbury's.