Yesterday was all about money and not in a good way! Keith was in at work with me and I said I'd have a bet on one of the Cheltenham races. I picked a horse called Buena Vista purely because there is a Lake Buena Vista in Florida. Keith moaned and said that he had a horse in the same race and I should pick another. Being the dutiful wife (!) I chose Poquelin in another race and placed a £5 bet for the horse to win.
Over lunchtime I happened to be browsing on the TripAdvisor forum and noticed that someone had mentioned they'd had a free rental car with their package with First Choice but that it hadn't included insurance... We have the same package with Thomson so I started to worry. Keith suggested I give Thomson a call, which I did and found out that we, too, have a car but no insurance. I was quoted £294 for two weeks and both of us were understandably not very happy. This was another cost we hadn't budgeted for. In the past we've always hired cars separately and they, of course, came with full insurance. The last time I went to Florida with my parents we were stung at the car hire desk for an upgrade and I certainly don't want it happening again!
I then spent the next half hour scouring the net for car hire rates but they were all coming out at the same price, about £270. We could have told Thomson to stuff their free car but for the extra £20 we phoned them back and upgraded our "free" car to one with full insurance. Nowhere had this been mentioned on booking so we'd have got a nasty shock on arrival in Florida. The Thomson man assured me that I had everything I needed because I told him that if we got to the desk and they informed me we needed to spend more money I'd probably explode!
While I was finishing my call to Thomson, Keith came back into the office looking a bit shell-shocked. He'd been watching his race (the one where I'd wanted to back Buena Vista) and I asked how he did.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said, not looking at me.
"Why?" I said, thinking that he'd won and was winding me up.
"I don't want to talk about it," he repeated.
A sudden thought dawned on me. "Buena Vista won, didn't it?" I asked.
Poor Keith looked really sheepish. "It did," he said. "At 20/1"
Then followed a good impression of me doing a Victor Meldrew scene as I would have won £100 which would have come in bloomin' handy!!!
Needless to say Poquelin, ridden by the excellent Ruby Walsh, lost. Oh well!
I managed to forgive Keith and when I got home later, very tired and looking forward to a glass of wine, he had some more bad news. The dishwasher was behaving strangely. We both took a look and there was a puddle of water in the bottom.Keith suggested we try and empty it so for the next hour we both grappled with pipes and tubes and huge puddles of water on our kitchen floor. I was soaked up to the knees but we managed to drain the water out, mopped the floor, put everything back in the cupboard under the sink (a nasty place) and switched it back on. After a few moments it stirred into life and we did a little dance of happiness...which was shortlived. Fifteen minutes later it ground to a halt and when we opened it the whole bottom was covered in water...
So that was our day. We've no idea how much it will cost to fix it...£100 maybe...Grrrrr! Compared to the poor people in Japan we have nothing to moan about and at least we have a nice clean kitchen floor!
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