FULL CIRCLE

Well this is it! We have come full circle and come back home to France. Our last travel picture was Bergerac airport where we took our first almost 7 months ago!! It has been so great to be back in France. Everyone at the KH gave us a wonderful welcome. All our travels have definitely made us realise where we want to be and the place we will call home for the next few years. Definitely here in France! We have loved catching up with all our friends here and the girls have enjoyed it too, we have hardly seen them all week.
I also think that a part of each year will be in the USA as that is the way business is taking us at the moment.
The weather has been glorious blue skies all week and much warmer than England. We have had a wonderfully relaxing week with Mark & Cath, drinking gallons of wine and eating delicious meals.
Half of me wants to just stay here and get settled but I realise too that we need to be back in the USA for the next few months to make our new business work. Hopefully though we will be back at the beginning of April ready to find ourselves a little house and get started.
We leave in the morning about 9am for the drive up to Boulogne so hopefully the Landy will behave and all will go as planned.
Our trip has been such an amazing experience and life changing in different ways for us all. The next post will be thoughts from all of us about the trip.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK!!

After leaving our cosy beds at 5.30am and stopping off at Einstein’s for a much needed coffee and bagels we arrived at the airport in plenty of time for our flights to New York. We thought we were very clever only having carry on luggage, after all we are the masters at traveling light now. We forgot about the ‘ I’ve got a uniform on and can steal anything from your luggage under the guise of it being not allowed under the new security rules’ lady. I specifically checked the website of the airline we were flying with and it said that nothing over 100ml’s. Anyway when my bag was checked I had a brand new Clinique moisturiser that was 10ml’s over and she put it straight in her pocket saying ‘well you can’t take that’!! Needless to say I was rather miffed. Never mind...on to NY.
We arrived at La Guardia at 11.30 am and the flights out from JFK were not until 6pm so we thought we may have time in the city to see a couple of the sights. As we were contemplating all this a guy came up to us and asked us if we needed a taxi ride. He said he could take us to see all the sights and get us to JFK for 4pm for $250. This seemed a huge amount until he said that just to get to the other airport would cost us $60. He promised us that he would be able to take us everywhere we wanted to go and to see everything including having a snack of the best New York hot dog we have ever tasted (not that hot dogs are really our thing, but when in Rome etc..!!). So we decided to go for it and hope he was not ripping us off.
Well what a day! I can’t think of one NY sight we didn’t see. From the Statue of Liberty to Times Square and the Watchtower building across the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park we saw it all. The hot dog was as good as he promised and so was the slice of NY pizza. The day could not have been better weather wise too. It’s a mad city and we all agreed we could not live there. The high rises seem endless and it makes Paris seem very calm and quiet.
The flight from Jfk to London was pretty uneventful, not great (no free booze, a first for us on a long flight) but not awful either. The films were good and we all managed to sleep a bit.
There was a nasty welcome for us in London though as the weather was dreadful. Cold and very rainy, so we piled on most of our clothes and quickly found the hire car we had booked and turned the heater up full blast. The drive up to Liverpool seemed endless and we had to stop once at a services to have a sleep, as although Nick does all the driving I am the official ‘keep awaker’! The girls slept all the way of course. We headed straight for Nick’s parents house which is where we were supposed to be staying as they were in Venice (we thought), dreaming of their lovely comfy beds that we would just crawl into. Unfortunately when we arrived it was to find that they had returned from Italy early as Fran was really ill with a stomach bug so we headed over to my mum’s and straight into her beds.
After a couple of hours sleep we dragged ourselves out to get the Chinese takeout we had been dreaming of for months and for a quick drink at the local (of course!). It’s lovely to be here with our family despite the weather and we are looking forward to catching up with some old friends here to before heading to France next Tuesday. Everyone’s excited about that!!!