Having moved back to the UK, you might think that we’d want to get settled somewhere ASAP. Unfortunately that wasn’t really possible as we had an almost two week trip in Scotland fast approaching that we’d planned with friends a long time before we decided to move overseas.
That meant it wasn’t really worth finding a place to live yet, so we decided to wait a month before making any firm decisions on that front. Shae and I didn’t completely rest on our laurels in the meantime though.
After arriving back in the UK by ferry in Newcastle, we rented a car for the week and drove a couple of hours south to Hull. We’d seen online that Hull is a low cost of living area which is what we’re looking for. The thing is, growing up in the UK I’d had unfavorable impressions of Hull. I was picturing it being gray, dreary, industrial, etc., so we decided to spend a few days there to check it out and get an idea as to whether it’d be somewhere we’d be happy enough to live, at least for a little while.
Along the way, we stopped off in York for a quick bite to eat. Shae was also interested in checking out a street called The Shambles as it’s reminiscent of Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter movies.
We stopped for lunch at the Shambles Tavern, a pub in The Shambles that’s also dog-friendly. One of the things we’ve been most looking forward to about living back in the UK is that it’s so much more dog-friendly than the US. Having lunch here gave Truffles her first pub experience in the UK.
I decided to try their Shambles pork pie, while Shae ordered a tuna, mayo and sweetcorn sandwich – a common sandwich filling in the UK.
After finishing our lunch, we continued on to Hull. We booked a stay at the Holiday Inn Express Hull City Centre as that would put us within walking distance of much of downtown.
The hotel was right next to a large shopping center, which itself had a large grocery store in it. That made it an even more convenient place to stay as it meant we could walk to the stores and restaurants.
We stayed there five nights, booking the final four nights with points (using IHG’s 4th night free benefit on award stays for their credit cardholders) and the first night with cash as that first night wasn’t bookable with points.
Having lived in hotels and Airbnbs for 7 years on our 50 state road trip, we’d gotten used to sleeping in king and queen beds. It’s therefore been a bit of an adjustment being back in the UK where you’ll often find double beds that are smaller.
I think both Shae and I had been running on adrenaline leading up to our move, so once we got to Hull we were exhausted. That led to several daytime naps which Truffles also appreciated.
After 15 years of living in the US and only occasional trips back to the UK, I’m loving the different snacks that are once again easily available, like chicken curry sandwiches, Worcester sauce flavor potato chips (called crisps over here), endless types of Cadbury brands, etc.
It’s also been fun getting to watch British TV shows that don’t get brought over to the US. For example, back when we used to live in the UK, there was a words and numbers game show called Countdown, as well as a panel quiz show with comedians called 8 Out Of 10 Cats. There’s now a combined show called 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown where it’s Countdown but with comedians. In the math round in the phot below, there are six random numbers and they have to try to use them to create a sum to make the randomly-generated large number above. They have 30 seconds to do this while there’s some kind of distraction going on.
I’m not doing the greatest job of selling the entertainment value, but I love it! It’s always fun playing along and seeing if I can make longer words with the given letters than the contestants can and if I can solve the math challenges. With the above challenge, the closest I got was 582: 25 x 8 x 3 – 9 x 2. Countdown has a resident math expert though who’ll always manage to find a solution if there’s one to be found.
As for Hull, it was much nicer than we expected. It’s certainly not the most quaint of cities in the country, but the people seemed friendly, there are lots of great amenities, a theater and more, so it certainly doesn’t seem like a bad place to live if we end up there.
After checking out of our hotel, we also drove around some neighborhoods in Hull that we’d found on Rightmove (the UK’s version of Zillow). During checkout, we got chatting to the front desk employee who said that he lived in The Avenues neighborhood which we already had on our list of places to check out. He said it was a nice area to live and it certainly looked decent – cute enough looking houses and plenty of local bars, restaurants, convenience stores, etc.
From Hull, we drove down to Haslemere to stay with my parents while we waited for our Scotland trip about 1.5 weeks later. My parents have a couple of recliner sofas which are very comfortable and which Truffles very much enjoys too. Her favorite is being on the recliner couch while laying on this soft blanket that she’s trying to claim as her own.
Our priority during this time was buying a car. We were very tempted into getting a Smart car for several reasons. They’re very cheap (there were many for less than £2,000 (~$2,650)), tax and insurance is cheap, they’re economical fuel-wise, they’re easy to drive on narrow English roads and easy to park in small parking spots.
We’d leased a Smart car for a few years in the US long before our 50 state road trip, so we knew what to expect from them. Its biggest downside was that if we got one of those, we’d have to rent a car for a couple of weeks for our Scotland trip, as well as when we have family and friends come to visit from overseas in the future.
Shae and I therefore decided to get a slightly larger car. Different types of cars are taxed differently in the UK, seemingly based on size, emissions, etc. We’d been looking at smaller SUVs, but those usually had annual road tax of £300-£400 ($400-$530) which would quickly add up year after year. Our focus therefore turned to vehicles that had much lower tax each year. We’ve almost exclusively owned Hondas and Toyotas over the last 20 years due to their reliability and were more than happy to maintain that streak. As a result, getting a Toyota Prius ended up becoming more of a focus because it also has low tax of £10-£20 (~$13.25-$26.50) per year.
We went to see a couple and decided to buy one with 200,000 miles on it. That’s a lot of miles by UK standards, but it’s automatic, has cruise control, was still in pretty good condition and cost just under £3,000 (~$4,000).
Other than car-hunting and working, we had a fairly low key time during those 1.5 weeks. We did take a trip to RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey as they had a dog-friendly Walkies at Wisley event on Easter weekend.
It was a really fun evening out as there were so many pups out and about, plus the gardens are pretty. You can read more about it in our post here.
A couple of days after that it was time to head up to London to meet up with our friends for our Scotland trip, so we’ll start sharing about that trip in our next post.
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