July 17 Getting going

Trip to Birmingham

This was the first part of the actual trip.  Commentary on the flight booking process and the accomodation selection process has previously been published.

Before getting to business here is the forecast for the first few days we are away.

Let no-one doubt why we are going.

Before getting down to the trip, here are a few words about travelling to Sydney to catch an international flight.  The airlines charge about $200 a return ticket, so for two people that is $400 (plus you make the Snow family feel good).  The car hire companies have realised that they have a low bar to straddle so they now charge $330 for the two ways (plus you pay petrol  and have to drive in and out of Canberra twice).  So for us the best bet was to use Discount Airport parking who are charging us $220.   (The bus doesn't work because of the taxi fares to get into Canberra to catch the bus.)

Jumping forward Discount Parking worked out brilliantly.  The took us from their yard to the airport within 10 minutes of us getting there and on return had us picked up and heading back to the yard no slower than it would take to pick up the keys for a rental car.

We set off about 7:30 to drop the small dog off at Reedy Creek Kennels.  This was done and she seemed to settle down satisfactorily.  We rumbled down the road to Sydney with no dramas.  The range read out on the Jetta suggested we could cover 1400 km before refuelling! The parking lot was found, the car deposited and ourselves shuttled to the airport.  After about an hour we were through the formalities and a further hour later were in the Malaysian Airlines A330.  They seemed  to have a relaxed view about the stowage of hand luggage, but did get it all stowed eventually before take off.  Bird of the day was Little Black Cormorant, seen as we took off.

There were many kids on the flight and several of them didn't seem to settle at all.  At one point it looked though the worst offenders were also coming on the flight to Amsterdam but fortunately they didn't turn up.  This one – in front of us - was very well behaved.

We saw – but couldn't photograph due to the position of the sun and humidity- brilliant scenery in the Kimberleys (view of the day) and around the Ord, and again some of the islands to the East of Lombok.  In passing, a contender for bad taste of the day was the Oxford Landing Shiraz served with the evening meal.  It was rather close to undrinkable  and won the “sensual" division..

The most interesting part of the 3 hours in KL was going into the Jungle Boardwalk.  There were a lot of bird calls in there but they all seemed to be recordings. 

The palms etc were very pleasant however and it scores Garden of the Day.  The bad taste – artistic division - award went to an ice cream stall, rather than the bromeliad shaped supports for the boardwalk.  

A near disaster occurred when I saw a KLM flight moved to a new gate.  This also implied the flight had been shifted back 30 minutes.  Fortunately some other passengers said that KLM sometimes have two flights departing close together, so we didn't report to the wrong gate after our flight had left!

Bird of the Day: Little Black Cormorant (last bird in Australia)

Building of the day:  No nominations

Garden of the Day: Jungle boardwalk in Kuala Lumpur

Bad taste of the Day:Ice cream stand in Kuala Lumpur

View of the Day: Kimberleys from 10kms above.

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August 2 Leave Tugford and see a little of Gunanxhou

Up when the passerine breaks wind and drive to Birmingham airport.

We had decided that we would, to some extent, follow a suggestion by Google Maps and travel via Bridgnorth.  (Their first suggestion was a little quicker but involved the M6, which as we knew from a previous experience can rapidly turn into a parking lot.)  They went to great lengths - back to the pace notes approach of turning every 900m or less through a set of lanes - to avoid Stourbridge but as we expected to be there before 6am I thought we wouldn't encounter much congestion so just aimed to go straight through.

We were both wide awake at 4:30 so got up packed up and were on the way before the sun joined us.  I assumed that, unlike Carwoola, we were unlikely to have substantial elements of wildlife jump out in front of us.  (Rabbits are not a problem, just cause a slight bump.)  While we had come across many road signs about deer none of these had delivered on their promise and I don't recall such signs around Tugford.  As expected, so it was.

The drive was a doddle with no remark-worthy events, and we were parked in the Europcar lot at Brum airport by 6:30.  This gave us 30 minutes to wait until the check in counter opened.  The entertainment was watching a couple of adults (travelling with 2 kids ) spend the entire 30 minutes (and they had started before we arrived) struggling with the self check in system.  They were obviously experienced travellers and had positioned the kids in the queue!  When we got to speak to someone it appeared that one of the seat allocations made on line hadn't taken (in fact the "missing" allocation was one that hadn't been able to be made) and that, although our seats had been pre-allocated, we would have to pick up our boarding passes for the last leg in Guanxhou.    Whatever: we got seats to Amsterdam and Guanxhou and wandered off to the departure area to fill in a couple of hours.

The flight to Amsterdam was quite OK and I noticed that the weather was the opposite of the flight in.  On that day the North Sea was cloud covered but the UK was clear, whereas today the land was clouded over but the sea was clear.  As we got within sight of the rest of Europe we saw an offshore (at least 5km)  windfarm with 60 turbines, none of which were turning.  Then came another farm with about 20 turbines, of which some were going.    The pilot mentioned that the day was going to be the hottest of the year in Amsterdam  reaching 35C and already (about 11am) up to 28.  Thunderstorms were expected in the evening.

No issues arose in Schipol and we joined our China Southern Airlines flight.  The plane is an Airbus 330.

Before getting to the flight we had to go through security including our first experience with body scanners.  I found this annoying because I reckon the scanners are just the security industry playing on political paranoia to sell more of their toys.  This view was reinforced when everyone then had to be patted down!

The aircraft seemed to be brand new or at least very very clean (as Frances said, cleaners don't get paid much).  We also seemed to have a fair amount of room compared to some other airlines.  There were a couple of small issues as we moved into the journey:

• where we were positioned, in row 50 and thus the last section of cattle class, the fasten seat belt signs didn't appear to work very well;
• my entertainment screen appeared to freeze occasionally (but that wasn't as much of a problem as the positioning of the controls for same, fixed into the armrest, rather than the usual detachable approach.
• the attendant who made the English in-flight announcements had such a thick accent I could barely understand her;
• When refreshments were served the white wine and the beer shared temperature with the red wine - and possibly the coffee.  However the white wine was quite pleasant whereas the red was the first really bad red I have found to come from Chile!.

Whatever we progressed, finding out that the thunderstorms were already happening as we flew South of Moscow.  In fact there little bumps for most of the first 6 hours of the flight.

I think I took the next shot for the exotic names on the map!

So after 10.5 hours we  landed in Guanxhou having been told to go to the transfer desk to get our boarding passes.  We followed signs to to the Transfer Desk where there was a huge queue - at least 100 folk - through what looked like an immigration set-up.  That couldn't be right, so Frances saw an information Desk and asked the young man sitting there what to do.  He jumped up and said "Follow me".  Since

• he was wearing a badge that said 'Police'; and
• this was the PRC

we did so rather swiftly.  He quickly found a young woman in an China Southern uniform to whom he handballed us.  She told us to go to a queue marked Priority Class with 2 people in it, which of course we did, despite feeling the hatred from the other 98+ in the 'normal' queue.  A key observation was that although - or perhaps because -  there were three people at each workstation none of the queues weer moving very quickly.  At about this point I noticed another young lady come in with a sheet of paper with a list of about 6 names on it that she passed to 'our' lady.  One of te names was mine, which I pointed out to her. Immediately, some Cantonese (an assumption there, but Guanxhou used to be Canton I believe) was emitted a desk was quickly cleared we were stuck in there and through in about 60 seconds.

Back to the gate with enough time to take a few images.  Obviously Guanxhou has been taking lessons in Western taste from the souvenir sellers of Schipol.  I particularly like the small child in a panda cossie!

 It was rather hot and humd here.  Guanxhou is at 23N (mirroring Rockhampton) and it was mid-Summer  so that isn't surprising.  Some mountains are just visible through the murk.

 This shot was taken to capture the houses on the far side of the airport.  Then I noticed the figure in orange at the bottom of the image.

 On zooming in, it turns out to be a scarecrow!  I am not worried about my camera's performance in the blurry shot: as noted above it rather hazy; my estimate is the figure was about 300m away; and I wasn't braced on anything!

 These high rises were again barely visible through the murk, but were taken to exemplify the clumps of such buildings seen all over the countryside after take, typically quite close to a cluster of industrial buildings.

So off we went, and I got a few more images before we penetrated the final 10/10ths cloud layer.  The first shows a typical sample of what we saw as we left the area (and pretty much what we had seen on the approach).

 Here is a cluster of industrial buildings and a rather impressive modern road bridge.

Then it was into or over cloud for the next 5 hours until we crossed the cost of Arnhem land.

Although I actually dozed for a bit of it the next hour or so went over really interesting scenery.  This included the many fires in Arnhem Land; the Coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria (we went out over the SW corner - in the image below the wobbles are mine, adjusting a Google earth screenshot)

We landed in Sydney, zipped through the official processes and out to the pick-up area to be re-united with our car by the excellent guy from Discount Parking.  Then to the Ibis Budget Hotel for a bit of sleep - not as much as expected - and at 5am we were going to the Maccas next door for some excellent coffee and on to the Hume Highway. Somewhat less than 3 hours later we were re-united with the small dog and then on home.

Recovery is taking a while as we seem to have picked up a cold somewhere.  As we got damp several times in the last few days, and many people on the flights seemed o have coughs, that isn't totally amazing!


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On the topic of airlines and air travel

When I first started planning this trip my intention had been to fly Emirates to Manchester as we did on the last trip.  However it seems that Emirates are no longer an economically rational airline.  Why is this so?  Could it be that having lined up with QANTAS they are taking instruction on client servicing from Buffoon O'Airline?

Whatever.  Plan B was to see what Expedia had to offer.  There was also some doubt about whether we needed to go through Manchester.  The only reelly reelly important thing was to avoid the world's worst airport (OK perhaps second worst - there is probably one in some regional centre of a small African country that is worse).  The key part of our trip was in Shropshire which is close to Birmingham (hereafter Brum as the natives call it) so I explored flights to that fine airport.  Expedia gave me a clue that KLM were the way to go having various flights to Brum.

I also wanted to stay the first night in Birmingham to have a look at that city and ensure we are in reasonable shape for the drive South.  So, on Saturday 9 February, I thought I would also book a hotel through Expedia.  Unfortunately doing the Hotel+flight option turned out that everything was driven by the choice of hotel (Wag that dog!) and one of the flights by KLM that looked particularly useful, due to being 4-7 hours shorter than any other, wasn't listed.

So back to the KLM site.  I was able to choose the flights I wanted and by doing an online bank transfer (Westpac Payanyone is fantastic) avoided the $60 slug involved with credit cards.  I also decided to reserve a couple of seats on the Kuala Lumpur - Amsterdam leg so that we stood a chance of getting some kip there.    That was going to cost me $165 each but whatever.  Then we got to the payment and it seemed to get to the checkout phase OK.  However

1. I couldn't seem to get it to charge me for the special seats;
2. their client service area wasn't open on a Saturday or a Sunday; and
3. there was some requirement to finalise all of this by Sunday!

Checking back to another part of the KLM site it appeared we had reserved the seats I wanted so I sent the money off - to some collection agency (Global Collect NV - presumably the NV stands for Nasty Violence, suggesting what will happen if you don't cough up).

So on Monday I rang KLM and it turns out that the payment situation was fine, but it will take 5 -7 days for Global Collect to send the cash to KLM.  At that point the tickets will be issued and I can ring KLM again to sort out payment for the seats.  The nice lady at KLM then asked if I wanted to reserve seats for other legs and was able to do it all except for the leg from Amsterdam to Guangxhou.  So we have a row of two from Guangxhou to Sydney, which is when I would really like to get some sleep.  Basically KLM end up getting a bouquet.

Interestingly, in looking up the link above for Global Collect I found that I could check on my bank transfer and it was rated as "In process" which is promising.  That is about the first time I have found one of these status check items to be of any help!

In rather less than 5 days I found a couple of e-tickets appeared in my email.  They mentioned nothing about the $330 I owed them so I rang KLM speaking to a very pleasant person with a Gallic accent.  He could help me out for $177.80 per seat!  I said what about the $165? There was then much fussing with him saying $177.80 was the go and me saying $165, but to his credit he nicked off- with me on hold -  and found it was on the web site for $165 so did something and made it so.  It took 45 minutes to save $25.60, so bad economics but good for my self esteem.!

Three days before we were due to depart I got an officious email from KLM stating they had to provide Advanced Passenger Information to the Poms.  Presumably to allow the police to alert News Limited to our impending arrival.  "Evenin' all."  This is annoying as the information that was shown as required came to name, age sex, citizenship and country of residence, all of which could have been collected at ticket purchase time.  However to get to that one had to go through three screen of KLM advertising.  Definitely Buffoon O'Airline style customer service!  They also had some optional fields for passport information but that:

• seemed rather like sending ones credit card information over an unsecured link;and
• I bet we still have to produce them about 5 times on the flight so thi would just make life easier for someone in KLM

so I passed on that but wished I had a Shillelagh in my hand and the Buffoon in range.

The fun continues.  The day before departure I got an email from KLM inviting me to check in on-line.  So I try to do so and get a screen saying I can't check in online.  One of the items you have to complete is the departure airport and it doesn't include Sydney in the pick list!!  Then I try to ring KLM and get told that they are open from 9am.  They are going to get a call which will pin their ears back a tad.

Plans, plans and more plans

This blog is going to cover our trip to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (thanks to a reader for pointing out the correct appellation) in 2010.  Before getting to the plans let us deconstruct that country name:

• Britain: OK, although the Britons as a genetic identity probably died out a couple of millenia ago.
• Great: once, certainly.  Now is more dubious.
• Kingdom: Why isn't it a Queendom?
• United: The place contains England (OK that wants to stay); Northern Ireland (about half the population wants to stay, even though they have got a separate mention); Wales (got their own Parliament and see N Ireland); Scotland (see Wales); Isle of Man (happy to stay as long as they don't pay taxes) and the Channel Islands (last time I checked they are two States and they are only in it for Foreign Affairs and a cheap army - see Isle of man  but the Channellers probably would rather be French).

The big picture of planning was that the trip was to involve touring Gothic Cathedrals and birding sites.  The driver of the process was the cathedrals, following the success of a tour of this nature around L'Ile de France in about 1997.  There are pages about those attributes elsewhere as linked.  This left us three things to book:

1. Flights;
2. Accommodation; and
3. Rental Car.

There seemed to be no real difficulty with flights so I thought the first thing to do was the accommodation in the UK.
Accomodation
This was made relatively easy by Frances finding the Enjoy England website.  Indeed the only problem with the site was sorting out the plethora of places they had on offer.  We ended up selecting three places as looking rather good:

• Ingleby Manor (North Yorkshire);  
• The Coach House (Norfolk) and 
• Beanacre Barn (Somerset).  

Is it not astonishing that each of these places is not only part of an internet based travel booking system but has its own website.  If only the banking system was as good!

We changed our mind a couple of times about the order to visit them, with that shown being the 1st selection and the final one after the Barn couldn't take us for the second week.  I wondered about doing the West Country first but it turned out the Glastonbury Festival was on that week which seemed to make it likely that part of the UK is going to be full of punks and junkies.  Thus we ended up as shown.

All three property owners seemed most excellent in terms of being very responsive and helpful to us (and it might be noted from the end of the trip they continued those traits even after meeting me).  Getting the three places organised took us about a five days elapsed time with Martin putting in perhaps 2 hours contact time.

The only issue was generated by the banks.  It appears that to send money to an account in Europe it is necessary to use an International Bank Account Number (IBAN).  This seems to identify the bank, the branch and the account.  Thus get rid of all the other crap about names etc.  Not for WESTPAC. (I have put in the link in the hope that all readers of this page send that company some email advice!)

Having seen the array of stuff they seemed to require for an on-line transfer (most of which I didn't have, and the one bit I did have contradicted info on the Westpac site) I decided to go for a serviced transfer. That got kiboshed because the teller needed the address of the Bank in England.  So I sent an email to the owners seeking this info.

Then I got an email from another property which looked as though it should work - even though the IBAN contradicted the WESTPAC advice - because it told me they were dealing with the Royal Bank of Scotland.  On doing this online it emerged that all that was really needed was enough detail to identify which of an array of bank names were to be used.  It seems that WESTPAC deal with Royal Bank of Scotland under a range of situations and they all have different SWIFT codes.  The only one that looked sensible referred to transfers so I picked that and it generated a SWIFT code.  There was no need to know the address at all.

So, back to situation 1.  The problem was that the info from the owners didn't include the name of the bank.  The appearance of the letters MIDL suggested 'Midland Bank' but that was taken over by HSBC some years ago.  So I googled GB69MIDL and up popped 4 webpages.  One of them, the membership page for the European Museum indicated the Bank name was none other than HSBC.  So I included that and again got a list of possible bank names: most of these looked fronts for the Corleone Family or the source of letters advising me that I had won a squillion dollars in a lottery I had never entered; however buried in the middle of it was "HSBC all British Branches" which looked to fit the bill.

What a palaver for something so simple.  The offending mob of idiots got a nice email pointing out the problems with the system.

A linguistic aside: in the old days 'bank-robber' referred to someone who robbed banks.  These days it is probably used as much to identify the banks as a subset of robbers!

AIRFARES

In early research I had found that Emirates was back being a cheap airline and one of those that flew directly into Manchester (a key driver of this process being to avoid Heathrow).  I very quickly found flights that matched our requirements and set about booking the flgihts.

Suddenly I found myself back at the WESTPACsite filling in something from Mastercard Secure "to ensure my security".  Having mentioned the s-word you can probably see that this is not going to be happy.  Sure enough the screen clears and I am told to contact my Emirates Office.  GRRRRRR!

So I ring Emirates and it turns out that the problem was that I hadn't registered with Mastercard Secure before starting the process.  Never having heard of this service before it was hardly surprising I hadn't registered with them.  The good thing about this was that the young lady taking the booking requested nice seats etc for us. 

Back to westpac, on the phone, with a whole lotta short, Anglo Saxon, words in my mind.  Their starting point was that only some companies use the Mastercard secure 'service' so it isn't really part of their system.  (ie it is Emirates fault.)  To get me registered, to prevent a recurrence of this lunacy, we search the WESTPAC site for Verified by VISA!!  I pointed out to the young lady - a different one, but also nice - that I used a Mastercard she said "Yes, but if you search for that you won't get to the right place."  The short, Anglo Saxon words got almost past my teeth!  After 17 minutes we had finished the exercise: as I commented to the young lady, I hope someone was recording the call so that they realised how appalling the system is.

Car rental

We decided this didn't have to be done for a while, so it wasn't.

Things that can stuff plans

Ash clouds

We decided that we would avoid Heathrow Airport as though it had developed mutated, extra-virulent, bubonic plague.  Everyone we have spoken to reckons this is good strategy.  So we are flying in to Manchester (it is also close to North Yorkshire).

Stone the sanguinary corvids!  Today ( 15 April 2010) flights into the UK are basically cancelled left right and centre due to volcanic ash from bloody Iceland.  Just under 50% of flights into Manchester - and a much higher percentage of those earlier in the day - get cancelled  First the cod wars; then their banking crisis and now they shovel ash into the way of tourists flying into the UK!

I hope this is well resolved by mid June!  The latest stuff  (10 May) seems to be that a fair chunk of Western Europe (France Spain Portugal, Ireland ) have shut down their airspace because of a new cloud.   Oh well, 6 weeks to go.  By May 17 Manchester Airport was stuffed (hopefully for a brief while).

Thailand does military rule!
To add to the entertainment the Red Shirts and the military in Thailand seem to be getting rather antsy.  From a selfish point of view one hopes they keep the action away from the airport.  From many other points of view one hopes they actually take a good hard look at themselves and realise that what is going on is crap.  But they're all politicians so that sentence is extremely naive.

Wireless Internet access

We acquired a netbook last year so that I cold record things while we were in Peru.  It did a pretty good job, but of course nowhere in Amazonas had electricity worth speaking of, let alone wireless internet!  A problem appeared to arise that it couldn't connect to our home wireless connection,  giving weird LINUX error messages about 'receiving offers' and 'persistent databases'.

After spending a lot of time in e-contact with a very helpful LINUX guru and phoning an ex-ABS contact I was still a bit in the dark.  Thus I invoked IT Rule 1: flail about at random enough and you will eventually fix the problem.  It emerged that somehow a password had been deleted.  I replaced it and Bingo!  I have now tested it at the National Library and it all looks good!

As at least 2 of our hosts offer wireless access that will be a great outcome.

Navigation
We won't bother with a fancy in-car GPS jobbie.  I reckon it would take us 3 weeks to learn how to program it!  My version of Linux doesn't as yet link to Google Earth but we have printed off some directions from Google Maps to get us between the main accommodation places (and to/from Manchester Airport).

18 June: Trip over

Start of the trip, to Sydney and head off to Manchester.

I have declared the blog to be final apart from any changes which I might make as other things occur to me or I find errors and fix them up  Enjoy!!

As seems to be the case these days this trip started with taking the small dog to the friend who is looking after her. Tammy seemed to make herself at home and seemed to get on well, albeit it excitedly, with the friends dog. Here is hoping.  (Update: small dog had a brilliant time with a Corgi playmate and excellent care.)

The drive to Sydney was fine, although a slight bummer that the car didn't have cruise control as expected. Fuel consumption was negligible!

We got slightly cranky with Emirates that the online check in seemed to achieve nothing. People who went to the 'normal process' seemed to get through as quick, or quicker, than we did. After this we browsed the duty free shops and saw Penfolds Grange – 2005 vintage – for a cheap $599.00! We ended up in the low-rent part of the international terminal. Somewhere along the way we saw a forecast for Dubai: a temperature range from 32 to 46C. So glad we are not stopping there.

The inflight entertainment was very comprehensive but it took me some time to work out. (I think I was stressing about the drive to Ingleby so not really relaxed.) There was an unusual icon appeared from time to time in the route map sequence. Eventually I realised that one part of it was the cube in Mecca which the hadjis parade around and this icon was indicating the direction of the Holy City. At one point the map showed an airspeed of 957kph and a ground speed of 785kph, which resolves to a head wind of 172 kph. That bit – across central Australia was rather bumpy. The red wine was excellent – 2007 St Emilion appelation controlee.  The 'beers' offered were Budweiser (US version); Heineken or Amstel Light.  I see a new objectivefor CAMRA!

The airport at Bangkok was rather dowdy. Outside temperature was 33C hot at midnight. After a short leg to Dubai we found it to be 33C there at 5am. The place was a hive of activity in a very impressive structure. A particular hive was the dunnies which seemed to be well undersupplied.

For some reason our plane parked a fair way from the terminal (given the size of the UAE we may have been in the next country). As we bussed to the building I recorded 4 species of birds: probably all on my list from 2005.  The amount of construction activity observable as we had headed to the terminal was most impressive: my impression (from the return trip) was that considerable progress had been made in three weeks, but we didn't take a comparson picture.  Here is the way over:

The flight to Manchester was reasonably unremarkable except for the number of crying babies in our part of the plane. There were a couple of good views from the plane:

• the Burq al Haj in Dubaii: currently the world's tallest structure (not visible through the murk); and
• a large (say 50 turbines) wind farm about 1km offshore in the North Sea. The mst astonishing thing to me was that at 10,000m (ie 10 kilometres away !!!) altitude even my crappy eyes could see the blades turning!  (I didn't have the camera ready for taking a snap of these.)
  

Trip Home

The check in and passage through security was quite about as painless as it was possible to be.   I am really quite impressed with that side of Manchester airport.  In fact I thought the place was pretty good all round.  One strange thing was the number of one-armed bandits (aka fruit machines in the US or poker machines in Australia) around the place.  Presumably concern about addiction to gambling hasn't spread to the UK yet.

The flight to Dubai took off on time and I spent a fair bit of it chatting to a 20 year old Mancunian sat next to me.  He had had an insurance policy mature and had deciding to spend it on a trip to Thailand, Vietnam and New Zealand.  He'd decide what to do for the rest of his life while on the way!  Very good luck to him!

Dubai airport was extremely crowded and the term 'cattle class' was very apparent as we were herded through various control points.  I suspect that the work of Temple Grandin on abattoir design could be applied with benefit to this. (As a parenthesis she consults for McDonalds, but about the abattoir end of their enterprise, not the Golden Arches part.)  It was interesting that the business and first class folk were kept in the same conditions, but roped off from the rest of us.  In fact they got the worst deal as they had to descend through the security bushwa like the rest and then, at the end of the process, get in a lift to go up to get in the top of the A380.

The aircraft itself was rather good.  We had a little more room than in the Boeing 777s used for our other flights and it was very quiet in the air.  In fact it was so quiet that Frances asked me if there had been an explanation why we were just sitting.  I explained that we had taken off half an hour earlier and were currently at 25,000 feet doing 580 miles per hour.

Despite that I couldn't seem to get solidly to sleep and felt quite ordinary as we got to Sydney.  However Immigration and Customs were dealt with as humanely as possible.  I then found it would cost an extra $5 to upgrade my hire car from a Corolla to a cruise control equipped Holden Kruse so we were on the road  in luxury (especially since the car had only got 4100kms on it.

Back to page to a very friendly greeting from the small dog who had had a lovely time staying with our friend Barbara and her corgi.  Thank you Barbara!!!   Out to the airport to transfer to Ingrid's car and to be chauffeured home.  Thank you Ingrid!!!  I lasted until 1pm and then fell into bed and slept until 5.  It is now the next day, after another 10 hours sleep and I merely feel poorly.  But that will pass and I will then get down to editing this blog - removing the more egregious typos, putting in the outstanding images and adding the summary pages,  Then wait for the book offers to flood in (remembering not to hold my breath during that process).