London - Buying a Car!

14/02/2015

Bought a car today - a big relief! Wasn't easy though. We had just missed out on a 'private' sale, realising that you needed to be first there with cash in hand ( a bit of a fight for anything 'good'). With the lack of a 'UK' bank account (still in process - another thing that isn't easy) we decided to head out to a huge dealer in Chelmsford. We walked around the corner with the hope of picking up a rental car to drive out to Chelmsford to find that this wasn't easy either! They had no cars (actually -10 cars(not sure what they really meant by this)) - ah , 'Yes' This is London.  So off we went on a bus to Liverpool St station (Chris had to jump off the bus half way there to run back to the apartment to check the heaters). The boys and I meet Chris at Liverpool St (he had hired a bike to make his journey - great that you can do this(you can even check the number of bikes available at each location through the London public transport website - 2pounds for unlimited 'half hour usages' over 24hrs)).
Another not easy situation - the train to Chelmsford required you to catch the over ground 3 stops then get on a replacement rail service bus (not off to a great start at all).
Ended up that the replacement bus was quite a nice adventure. We got to travel through the English countryside for 40ish minutes - passed through a gorgeous village called 'Stock'. Lachlan said 'this is really lovely here, it would be nice to be here but I think it would be too expensive'. Lovely narrow hedged lanes ...
We then needed to catch a taxi to the actual dealership - another not easy thing (had to keep an eye out for one large enough to fit the five of us). Pretty knacked we got to the dealership, which was a bit of an eye-opener - Huge! We were later told they sell approximately 250 cars a month. We had a great guy(extremely unpushy (I guess they don't need to be with their turnover)) help us.
At the end of the day there were only really two contenders ( the VAT free car in our budget had just been sold as was the very 'cool' Defender(which had been bought by someone exporting it back to NZ)). We took out the Landrover Discovery 3 for a drive - with three very excited boys in the back(looking pretty happy in the comfortable seats). Then we drove a Volvo XC90, which was very nice but was ruled out (very loud engine and more car-like). The very stylish BMW X5s were sadly too small as was the Volkswagen Touareg. So the Land Rover Discovery it was - this is actually the car we had in mind originally (5pm by the time we paid the deposit). We get to pick it up after a week of them doing the things they do to it. Now I get to organise car insurance with no UK address - very uneasy!