Que dramón!

Up at 4am to see my brother and his wife off on their way to Heathrow and London, respectively. By 5am, they were ready for the off, the car boot all loaded up with numerous cases and… the car keys!! Don’t ask me for the technical details but apparently locking the keys in the boot is quite a common occurrence with this particular model of car.

Not that any time is a particularly good time to have to try and contact your car hire firm to tell them that you’ve locked the keys in the car, but 5am on a Sunday morning has to possibly be the worst! It took an hour before we eventually managed to get hold of someone who said they would arrange for a locksmith to come and unlock the car within the hour, so that would be by 7am, we thought... At this point, D gave up on making his 9.20am flight to Singapore, and then spent the next two hours trying to change his flight (once again, the problem being trying to get hold of people on a very early Sunday morning.) He was incredibly lucky; the airline agreed to change his ticket, and he managed to get the last seat on a flight home, travelling via Zurich at 1840.

Phew, we all thought, panic over! How foolish were we…. To cut this long saga short, despite numerous phone calls to the car hire company (which shall remain nameless!), six hours after having been told that someone would be there within the hour, no one had turned up! By this point we’d all had enough, a large hammer seemed a very tempting solution to the problem! But thanks to the internet, I managed to find a local auto locksmith who lived ten minutes down the road who, even though he wasn’t working today, kindly came to D&C’s rescue, and by 1.30pm all was sorted and they were on their way (8 1/2 hrs late!), D to Singapore, via Heathrow and Zurich, and C back to London, the V&A and Frida. As for me, pointless going back to bed, so after only 4 hours sleep I’ve just dragged myself through the day in a haze…

Oh, and the car hire locksmith still hasn’t turned up!