Tuesday 25th September 2007

A change of plan and a thunderstorm.
We are enjoying the very relaxed pace of The Odyssey so far and don't want to have to rush on just because we had Southern Poland on the original, tentative itinerary. So, Poland is off the list for the moment – perhaps next Summer? We always intended to visit Vienna and being only 3 and a half hours away, we have decided that, after a few days here, we will go there next.
Back to today. We went for a morning walk around the nearby fish pond of Svet and got back in time for lunch. The weather was lovely so I put out the table and chairs so that we could eat outside. It then got darker and darker and the distant rumbles of thunder made me decide to put them away again! It poured and as I write this at 16:30, it is still raining hard - a good time to catch up with the log and emails.
Jane has just spent nearly an hour on the phone to Barclays trying to put some money on our Travel Cards. This is a new offering from Barclays and works like Travellers Cheques but without physical bits of paper. It is allegedly the cheapest way to obtain foreign currency when you are abroad, if you can get it to work. Barclays don't seem to have got their act together and even their own staff could not make the system work. They were very apologetic and the person that Jane spoke to was very helpful and sympathetic. Once they found out that we were phoning from abroad, without any prompting, they offered Jane £20 compensation. After more than 30 minutes of our phone call and another two phone calls from them, we finally had the money transferred to the card. Let's hope that we don't have to go through that every time.
Just need to sort out the brolly and then go up to the office to use the Internet. Damn, just realised that the brolly is in a locker under the van, only accessible from outside. “Jane, just go and get the brolly will you, I am busy writing my log”. Unprintable reply!
Well that was a total waste of time! I had already asked if they had WiFi aka wireless Internet, which resulted in a tour of the bar asking all of the people what WiFi was. It was obvious that they didn't! So I went up with the Odyssey Log on a USB key only to discover that they had Windows 98 and no USB. So, the posting of the Odyssey Log will have to wait until we get to Vienna where the site has WiFi access, allegedly.