My SiL (brother's wife) insisted on putting cash in an envelope and having my parents bring it over, rather than buying something off of our registry. This is fine except my mother was very uncomfortable playing mule for this, worrying that if their bags got stolen the money would just be gone, and my SiL sent USD! Also, I've already misplaced it, along with the US money her parents sent via my mother. Bonkers.
DH took the US cheques we got to Nation Wide which had a very complicated procedure for foreign cheques, variable fees that couldn't be determined in advance and they wanted him to fill out a two sided form for each cheque! So he took them to Barclay's who had him fill out one form for all of the cheques and charged a very small percent per cheque up to a certain amount and a week later they'd cleared at an exchange rate (including fees) of $1.65/£1. So that wasn't terrible.
One of my friends asked why we didn't just pay the checques into paypal, which I didn't know was an option:
http://lifehacker.com/5656848/paypal-for-iphone-deposits-checks-via-camera
