So, back to the UK! I really enjoyed the family reunion but the girls were bored silly. When I was their age I used to enjoy these affairs but then I had lots of cousins my age that I really enjoyed catching up with. The girls had one or 2 distant cousins under 30 there but hardly any other teenagers there. I took lots of photos of various generations of the family, which I will post as this is MY blog, even if they will not interest anyone else! Sharron, Ryan, Devon and Emma arrived looking very smart but they had just come, or were going to, a wedding. The ‘children’ all looked very grown up!
Auntie's and Uncle's (my Daddy's siblings):
Cousins: Michelle, Tricia, Pauline, Sharron, and Mary
We had our final evening at Helen and Paul’s then the very sad goodbyes. It was really hard to leave them and some tears were shed. They had been such wonderful hosts and completely unfazed by our invasion of their home over the previous month.
Up to Ava’s the next morning. Mia and Maddie were now recovered from illnesses and Harriette and Alice loved being with them. Eric’s nephew Todd met up with us all in a typical London pub. We stopped there after we had all been for a walk through the park and Mia and Maddie had shown us their schools. And Yes, Todd, like all the others, has grown up! No longer the undergraduate teenager who visited us in NZ, but a confident young man working in London and recently returned from a holiday in Mexico. Todd spent the afternoon with us and came when we went to the pub in Hammersmith for our grown up night out. Well this didn’t go quite to plan and I’ll tell you why. I could not transfer our Outlook mailing list into webmail or hotmail. I had therefore, printed it out with the intention of sending an email to everyone to let them know where we would be meeting that night in a quiet moment (!) when we were on our travels. Unfortunately, I left the printout in London at Ava’s and, as we only arrived there mid-day, I did not have time to get the info out. So. We met up with Helen, Stan, Carol and Milky only. A cosy affair. None the less, still a good evening. Stan has finally moved out of the squat (not really a squat!!) into a house. A sensible move. He has made a lot of money on his Woking flat but really needed to move into more ‘grown up’ accommodation. Well at his age!!
And so, the next day - our last in the UK. I took the girls to Primark for a final clothes shop, then packed for our departure – a mammoth task. Why did we bring so many clothes???? Again we are grateful to Ava and Henry for putting us up, and allowing us to leave bags and other stuff clogging up one of their bedrooms while we travelled. We got to Heathrow, deposited the hire car, checked in our bags (phew – no excess to pay) and went to go through the departure gates, only to find we could only take one piece of hand luggage each. On the way to the UK (prior to Glasgow) we were allowed 1 piece + laptop + handbag. Now we had to wedge it all into one. Thank heavens Eric had bought a trampers day pack which had almost nothing in it. So, under instruction from a rather stroppy security woman, we moved to one side, put the laptop and some stuff from H, A’s and my hand luggage into it so we could fit our handbags into our cabin bags and went through. We THEN find out that the laptops have to be removed (from its case in the bottom of this day pack) and be put through the screening machines in a tray on their own!!!!!!!! In the departure lounge we finished writing, and posted, the heaps of Thank you cards we had been carrying round with us. And then we left, aboard another jam packed plane heading for Singapore.
We cannot thank enough everyone who contributed to making our holiday the wonderful, memorable trip that it was. We are blessed with great friends. As I have probably said earlier in this missive, our biggest regret was not having more time to spend with people. So, once again, and for a final time, a huge Thank You to you all.
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