Hi,
We are traveling to The Cotswolds (Stow-on-Wold) from London. We want to stop in Oxford on the way. We don't want to drive in London but we want to have a car in The Cotswolds. My initial plan was to take the train from London to Oxford, then rent a car in Oxford for the round-trip drive to Cotswolds. We have a couple of concerns though.
First, we need an automatic transmission, and even though we have a reservation for a car with auto transmission, I don't have a high level of trust with car rental companies and I'm worried we're going to get to Oxford and they'll tell us there are only manual transmission cars left. Second, I've read on these forums that driving around Oxford is really tricky. Third, we need a place to store our luggage while we're visiting Oxford for the day, before we pick up the rental car (to avoid paying higher fee for rental car while having it for those extra hours). Is there any place to store luggage at the Oxford train station?
And would we be better off renting the car from Heathrow in order to have a better chance of getting an automatic transmission car, since there's a bigger inventory of cars? Does that add a lot of time to the trip? It looks like Oxford is right on the way and Heathrow adds another stop from London. We're in "the City" neighborhood of London so it will be another train ride within the city to get to whatever train we need to take to the next place, unless we hire a car to Heathrow.
Sorry for the muddled nature of my questions... you can probably tell I have a lot of questions within this one message. Any tips on any of this are appreciated--thanks!