Originally Posted by
Joe758
Thanks to everyone for the help. We aren't truly strapped for time when we get there. We are staying near a train station so it shouldn't be a problem to pop in to a store and pick up and sim. Since we are topping up at the same time, it shouldn't cost anything extra.
I don't need to know my number in advance. Only a few people we'd need to contact and we can text them or FB the number when we get it.
Stopping somewhere to buy additional isn't a problem since I don't think we'll need to or can always stop by somewhere during the day. If we are going over, I'll keep the website handy to buy online.
Good show and believe me I'm not trying to disuade you but let me throw out one other possibility; probably not likely but it happened to me several years ago. If you have your heart set on 3, you go into say Carphone Warehouse and the clerk out of nowhere tells you they're out of 3 sim cards but he can sell you a O2 card with a similar plan. Of course, being a cynic, he may be telling the truth or his coompany might be telling him to push O2 as they get a larger commission.
Of course, probably the easiest and least troublesome is to go to the 3 web site and ask them to send you 1 or 2 free sim cards to your hotel of arrival. Then upon arrival, you can go into any place that does top ups, top up for £10 and add on the extra you want. Just so many easy ways to deal with UK PAYG sims and for us Americans there is one big advantage you can't quibble with. In the UK, the language they use is English, a close variant of course of American. You should have little trouble communicating with clerks to get what you need although you might be surprised at the number of foreign students working in these jobs whose English is limited. But you shouldn't have all that many problems.