Wow, what a long journey from NZ to UK. If you include the travel to Queenstown Airport and travel from Heathrow Airport to East Grinstead , it was 40 hours. 24 hours flying plus 11 hours in transit, plus to and from airports. Anyway, exhausting but the adrenalin keeps one going. It took me 4 days to recover fully in England.
No boda boda travel in England, but a few safaris were had. I was cat sitting at Judith’s for the first couple of days. After Judith returned from Arusha (what a coincidence), I went down to Eastbourne for a few days. Spent a few hours in a pub with my bros Alan and Mike. Had a really good catch up. Spent a couple of hours with Mum as well; good to see her looking so well. Great to see the family after being away.
England is all about meeting up with friends and family. Met Denise who, with her husband, is actually an executor to Angela’s estate…so that was a surprise. But great that I’d made the effort to meet her, even if only for an hour. And especially as I won’t make it to Angela’s funeral on the 19th of Dec. Went to the funeral directors and made a donation to St Wilfred Hospice. Strange to think that Angela was lying just a few yards away; tears welled up. Bye bye old friend.
Judith had given me a lift to Lewes to get to Eastbourne. I went my usual way to Forest Row via Haywards Heath. My bus just decided not to arrive so I was well over an hour waiting. Reminiscent of Africa perhaps ??!! A few visits to the Village Club. Paid my subscription for next year, which I won’t be using until end of May but worth it for the cheap cost of 10gbp. Met with my Frow friend Phil a couple of times. Met Chantal in EG on one of her cat food visits from Clapham Junction. And in general, had a lovely time at Judith’s.
I was my usual stressed out self before flying. But for good reason for once. The Post Office weren’t sending travel insurance doc. email attachments , instead you had to create a customer account, and it wasn’t working. I wanted to pay my tax due to HMRC, but when I thought I’d done it, I saw that the money wasn’t leaving my account. So I tried another way. I guess the weekend was the problem, because on Monday morning the PO account was successfully created, and the HMRC payment seemed to go through. But of course I therefore managed to pay my tax twice!!! Not a huge sum of money, just very annoying.
Mon 28th. My KQ flight from terminal 4 was leaving at 5:30 pm. Nice to be on the move again, and a calm trip to Victoria Station and tube ride to Heathrow. The check-in process was quite quick. Customs and Immigration was incredibly fast. Time to kill with one drink, then on to my flight to Dar es Salaam.