Welcome Home

Dori is back home. Yay!

I drove up to Gatwick airport yesterday to collect her. As with the outward journey, it meant a ridiculously early start for me - before the birds had even begun to clear their throats! Gatwick is further away than Heathrow, about 40 or 50 miles more, and Dori’s plane was due to arrive at 7a.m., so it was a crack of dawn start to the day.

The weather here for the last week or so has been glorious. In fact I can’t remember such a long stretch of unbroken sunshine for a very long time. So, it was a pleasant ride up to the airport (if driving along the motorways here can ever be said to be pleasant!), with my iPod choosing the music as I went. The sun rose as an orange ball as I left home, but was very soon shining brightly as I sped along the motorway.

I arrived at Gatwick at nearly the exact time that Dori’s flight was due. We are both very used to that journey, having made it countless times when we were both flitting back and forth across the Atlantic before we got married. So I knew roughly how long it would take me, and I arrived at pretty much the time I anticipated. It was a little chaotic when I arrived at the terminal as they are currently making changes to the road layout there, and have moved the drop-off point to directly in front of the car park entrance. Cars were going in all directions! Anyway, I manoeuvred my way across one lane of cars, and slipped quickly into the car park, leaving the mayhem behind me.

Having parked up, I walked over to the terminal and began my wait for Dori. The plane landed just a couple of minutes later, and so I anticipated a further 45 minutes or so for her to deplane and go through immigration, baggage claim and customs. An hour and a half later I was getting a tad worried! Thankfully, Dori then appeared at the end of the corridor. Apparently it had taken forever to get through immigration because they only had 2 people working there trying to get 2 or 3 plane loads of people through! But all was well :-)

We said our hellos and then made our way back to the car, and onwards back to Wiltshire. Sometimes the journey back from Gatwick can seem like it is taking forever, and yesterday was one of those days. Having to travel around the M25 (the inspiration for Chris Rea’s “Road to Hell”) doesn’t help!! For those that don’t know, the M25 is a ring road that encircles London, and is always extremely busy; and sometimes, as yesterday, at a complete standstill. So, it took much longer to get back home than it had for me to get up to the airport.

But, get back we did, and Dori is now fast asleep upstairs as I write this, trying to catch up on her missed sleep, and recovering from the jetlag. She had a wonderful time back home in Georgia, and I am sure she will be blogging about it all for you very soon!

In other news, apparently the World Cup is still going on, but I forget who is doing well and who is doing so abysmally poorly!! :-/ Maybe I will remember before the next time!