The final stretch

Thursday 20th August - Our last full day

More packing but not surprising really.

I also started working on slide shows of our photos so we have something to use to show people what we got up to when we get home. Even after being very selective the full run of slide shows extends to over an hour, and this is using a very small percentage of our thousands of photos.

We did get out, we headed up the 192 and played a game of Crazy Golf, and we even managed a swim, but most of the day was spent preparing for the fact that we leave tomorrow.

Dinner consisted of a Chinese take-out from the Chinese over by Sweet Bay, it is pretty useful having a Chinese within a couple of minutes of the house, we then watched the Hannah Montana movie, which I picked up for Baggage yesterday. I enjoyed it more than I expected I guess, though maybe I should not admit to that!

More packing in the evening and then fairly late to bed.

Friday 21st August - Time to go home

We have until 1pm to finish sorting the house out before we have to head for the airport, and for the first time since we bought this house six years ago we are leaving not knowing when we will next be coming back.

Mum phoned this morning and told us that Candy, our cat had died. She had stayed at our house whilst we have been away, she was 17 so not a young cat, but my Mum had been around to feed her every day, this morning she found her dead on our driveway, all evidence suggests it was just old age. Quite sad really that she had waited for us since we went away and dies within 24 hours of us getting home.

We did get some good news this morning, the package of wooden souvenirs we had purchased in Fiji had arrived back in the UK, almost exactly three months to the day since we had purchased then, the delivery expectation set by the Fijian shop keeper.

We left for the airport with six very full cases to check in, we had left the UK with three, all with space in them, we had already shipped one very full case back with Danny and there was our very full box of items shipped from Fiji, not to mention the various other packages we had shipped back along the way. All our six bags were either as physically full as they could sensibly be, or were on the limit for check-in weight.

Our flight back was fairly uneventful, direct from Orlando to Gatwick and leaving pretty well on time.

Saturday 22nd August - Home

The trip is now really over, we were picked up this morning by Danny from Gatwick airport and he drove us back to Devon via his house in Guildford where we stopped for him to pick up some stuff and for us to have a bacon sandwich. We got home around lunchtime, in places the roads were pretty busy, but it was not too bad, then it was straight into sorting through the cases and finding the various parcels we have bought back for people.

Katie is due back from Fort Lauderdale in less than a week, so we need to get ourselves sorted before all descends into chaos once again.

Would I do it again - ABSOLUTELY!