Jules the Jeep

I decided to hire a car to head into Essex on Tuesday to look at houses because I really couldn't be bothered lugging my very large 30 kilo suitcase around with me on the train. I booked with Expedia online and ordered a Fiat 500 for £34 for 2 days, I ended up being given a free upgrade to Jeep Renegade (so nice) which made me super happy.

The day before I was going to go and view some houses to rent in different areas of Grays, I called one of the agents to see if we could change our viewing time to 11:30am so I could sleep a little longer in the morning. Good thing I called because they'd let out the house we were going to see and weren't going to let me know. I had a feeling I needed to call the other agent who we were meant to be viewing a £925 a month house with, and sure enough, that had been let already as well. Good customer service rental agents. We sort of went into panic mode then trying to set up different viewings. We did manage to lock in 3 and 1 viewing of a place found on spareroom.com.

After heading out of Droitwich at 7:30am on Tuesday morning (not without a few wrong turns) I headed down to Wallingford (Oxfordshire) to pick up housemate number 1, Siahna. What was meant to be a 1.5 hour journey ended up being 3 hours because the traffic in the UK is unlike anything I've ever seen. Literally parked on the A34. It took me over an hour to travel 12 miles. Not fun. Then I missed the turn off. Great.

Once we headed off to Essex the GPS told us it would take around 2 hours, realising this meant we'd miss our 12pm viewing time, we realised we didn't really care and stopped for Starbucks. By the time we got to our first viewing it was 1:20pm, I'd taken so many wrong turns it wasn't funny and I was starting to get overly frustrated haha.

Going under the River Thames

Plane!

This is my 'oo I better check the what the car in front is doing' face

And this is my 'look a plane' face

The first house's 3rd room was so small I could have lay down and touch both sides of the room. That was a no. The second house was really filthy and right by a main road. No thanks. We then went to view the rooms for rent on spareroom. £500 a month each including all bills. Nicely tucked away from the main roads and 2 minutes walk to the train station. Needless to say we put a deposit down right there and we're moving in on Monday! I can officially say I'm now a resident of Chafford Hundred :)