Day 142 - Saturday 25th May 2024

....... with my watch changed, it became the final day of my epic big journey. Over Europe now but still with several hours to go, the cabin crew started preparing for the breakfast service. Breakfast was served two and a half hours before landing at 02:00 (early even for me!)

I said to hold that thought regarding dinner earlier in the flight ..... because we'd not had any choice in the back row, we were asked what we wanted for breakfast so that we had the choice this time, and were served before service had started to the rest of the cabin; a very nice (by airline food standards) cooked breakfast. We'd finished and cleared away before the rest of the service reached us. 

Then it was a case of preparing for the landing; we landed at 04:37 (according to Flight Tracker) and after a 10 minute taxi were at our gate. Through passport control quickly, and luggage reclaim was painless; it's the first time when I've looked at the board for the carousel number, and there is only one flight shown!

I followed the signs down to the Elizabeth Line, and had two options for a route home given I was a bit earlier than anticipated. One was via Stratford to get the mainline with an associated replacement bus service, but had a couple of very short timescale changes (5 minutes to get from Platform 10a to Platform 8 at Stratford with luggage seemed a bit of a risk, especially if the train arriving was a minute or two late), so I decided on a slightly more leisurely journey that would get me to Norwich only 20 minutes later; Lizzie Line to Farringdon where I had 15 minutes to change to Thameslink which would get me to Cambridge, then after a 35 minute connection Greater Anglia would take me from there to Norwich.

I let Mum know my plans, and then settled back to enjoy the ride; it surprised me how quickly Thameslink was out of the built up area and into countryside via Hitchin, Stevenage, Baldock and Royston. Time for a coffee at Cambridge (not a patch on the quality I've come to expect in New Zealand and Australia!) before the 08:20 to Norwich arrived spot on time. At 09:40 I arrived into a rainy Norwich (it had been such a nice sunny day in Cambridge as well!) and met up with Mum for a lift home. A stop off at Morrisons for supplies, and then a very tired traveller was once more back home.

So, that's it. My big trip is ended ...... well the physical trip is ended. Over the next few weeks I'll mentally start to unpack these last 21 weeks. It's been all go, and at the moment the memories all feel very mushed together. Some things that happened at the start feel like only yesterday, and other things that happened only a few weeks ago feel like distant memories. The plan is that I'll summarise everything in a week or two, so keep checking this site.

The final bit of business is the video for the final week. As I write this very early on the Sunday morning (I was wide awake at 02:00 as expected) the video is the next job, and will be published here (if the link isn't there yet, it soon will be!).

So, a big thank you; I've had some lovely comments back about my blog which has made it so worthwhile doing. I've done some epic things over the last few months, met some fantastic people, made some wonderful memories and on the whole my spell of good luck has held, running a little short only from Broome onwards. I've driven a lot of miles, and circumnavigated the blue marble that we all call home; it does make it obvious how small this world really is.