The good news is we can get out of the UK the bad news it is not for 16 days

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Tuesday 20.4.2010 day 188
The good news is we can get out of the UK the bad news it is not for 16 days
First thing today we extended out hotel for another night and extended our car hire for another week. We took a drive around the area we went to a little sea side town and had some hot chips but the sea. Then we drive to Colchester the oldest town in England. When we got home we managed to get hold of our airline and the first flight to Canada that they could book us on was the 6th of May in 16 days time. So at least we have a date. The problem is that means that we cannot get to the 2 weeks of accommodation that we had booked in Canada. I have emailed the accommodation twice now and tried calling them but there was no answer. So I do not know if I will get any money back on not. I still need to contact my insurance company and see what they will cover if anything as well.
The Airline has to cover Accommodation and food under EU laws, when I asked them about that they said they would find out and call me back in about an hour it has been 6 hours now and still no call back. So we do not know if the accommodation and food will be cover or not and if so how much will be covered. This makes it hard when trying to book accommodation in the UK should we go very cheap as it is not going to get payed back or should we do 4 star and we will get it back from insurance or the airline. Can we got out for dinner or should we food from the supermarket and eat it in our room? What we did manage to do was change all of our onward trips so that we did not lose time in other places and we made less time in places we have decided we want to spend less time in. We did all of this without the fee usually applied for changing flights. At 10pm today they opened UK airspace and flights started landing. We were the last flight to Canada cancelled so will be some of the last people to get flights out of the UK due to the volcano. It looks like BA have forced the aviation authority to lift the flight restrictions as the BA CEO was in a meeting with the aviation authority and government and other airlines etc but BA already had about 21 flights from all over the world heading to UK airspace that was closed when they got out of the meeting the air space opened and not long after that the flights started landing. So well done BA. As a treat we had dinner in the restaurant where we are staying.

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