It was easy, painless and rather quick, but today we hopped on a train and ended up in Birmingham. We showed up at the train station and in the span of half an hour booked a hotel, car, and train ticket to Birmingham. It’s always funny to me how when you travel things work out in rapid succession.
Commuter trains to Birmingham run all day long, and are quite cheap. We also discovered while trying to get a car online that it was cheaper for us to hire a car for Birmingham while in London (Easy Car). Don’t ask me why. We had to do all the work online because the car agency wouldn’t take rentals at the actual kiosk; their purpose is to give you keys to a car as quickly and efficiently as possible.
We are staying in the heart of Birmingham at the Britannia Hotel and is located on New Street next to the train station. New Street is like Stephen Avenue only much larger and packed with tons of happy people. Birmingham has a reputation for being a culturally rich city, and after walking up and down New Street a few times I tend to agree. There was so much to see and I spent much of the evening people watching and drinking coffee.
I also bought a map of Birmingham and an UK road atlas, because there is no way I would be able to navigate without having advanced knowledge of the roadways. Traffic circles look scary and the driving on the left side of the road daunting; but, from growing up in Nova Scotia I know that the most important rule of traffic circles (a.k.a. roundabouts or rotaries) is that the person in the middle has the right away. And, if you screw up, stay in the circle and keep going around until you know what to do next.
