Thursday 1st December

Hong Kong to London was also fairly stress free. We had to wake Stella to get her off the plane but once inside we were put through priority line for security screening. Hong Kong airport is big, open and bright. Kids ran around and found some other kids to play with. It was 10:30pm Hong Kong time, but for Xavier and Stella it was almost 1am.

Back on the plane we were soooo tired, but stayed awake for dinner. Can I add that airplane food has improved muchly since I traveled last. It was actually really tasty. We all slept for a few hours and the kids really were fantastic for all but the last 4 hours or so. Which while it was a long time for them to be annoying, considering we were in the air for 9 hours then 14 hours (not including the 1.5 hour drive to the airport and the time waiting and on the plane from Melbourne to Sydney), it really wasn't that bad.  I still had my watch on au time and realised that for the kids body clocks it was lunchtime and they hadn't eaten since the night before, they would have been starving. Stella in particular gets rather challenging when she is hungry.

They served breakfast, which Stella promptly threw up all over herself. Nothing quite as lovely as vomit on a plane. She fell asleep again while we were descending and landing and once again had to be woken to get off the plane. On arrival at Heathrow, we were met with water, apples and chocolate. Xavier went for the chocolate while Stella opted for an apple. Long queues for passport clearance, but it did mean that our bags were well and truly ready for us by the time we got through. On unpacking at our house we noticed that one of our cases had the wheels busted off (have contacted airline, and will see what they offer, my feeling is not a lot seeing as we didn't report it at the airport). Then we headed off through the 'nothing to declare' doors expecting to have customs officers at least have a quick look in our cases...ummmm nope... nothing... no one... nada.... zippo... I kid you not, we quite seriously just walked right on through to the waiting faces of family.

My first impression of Heathrow airport, its like a hospital. Long white corridors everywhere and eerily quiet.

David and Teresa greeted us and in their 2 small cars we managed to fit all our stuff and all of us. Was so great to finally meet the woman who has stolen the heart of my favourite brother-in-law. Ok, so I only have the 1 brother-in-law, but Dave really is awesome. Stella and I went with Dave in his car, mainly because he had the smaller car seat and Stella was particularly tired and precious and just wanted her mumma close by.

We found our way to our new home and marvelled at the fact we had been in darkness for about 16 hours straight. Our plane landed around 4:30am UK time and we got to our house around 6am.

Ours is the half without the bay window.

Our cottage is just beautiful. built in 1868 its small but just lovely. The view from the toilet is amazing, lol, and the kids are having a ball on the stairs.

This the view you get sitting on the toilet

Dave and Teresa both had to leave us to head to work, so we hung around the house waiting until 9am and the shops would open. We unpacked and gave the kids a bath to try and wake them up a bit. We toyed with the idea of getting them to have a nap, but once the reality of that kicked in, they both decided that wasn't such a great idea afterall.

building plaque

 We tried to work out the heating situation as while it wasn't freezing, it wasn't warm in the house either. We gave up and headed to the nearest supermarket to grab some food. OMG food is sooo cheap here. Seriously, it was 59p for a kg of bananas. That's about $1 Australian. So Stella was happy. We also grabbed an awesome cherry tomato and pesto pizza for dinner for 2 pound, it was an awesome pizza too. The best bit is, Rekoderlig ciders are 3 for 5 pound, about $8 Australian, oh yeah, mumma gonna come home with a drinking problem.

We decided that just trying to stay awake was the best option. We hoped we could hold everyone out til 6pm and sleep until 6am. It didn't quite go according to plan. Stella crashed in a bean bag around 2:30pm and Xave was asleep on the couch not long after. Adam and I ate dinner at 4pm then went to bed. Kids woke around midnight and weren't really keen to go back to sleep. Adam put Stella in with me and he went and got into her bed, which worked for Xavier, but after an hour or so of talking my ears off with all kinds of insane stuff, she declared she wanted to get back in her dinosaur bed. (they have dinosaur doona covers on their beds) so everyone went back to sleep until about 5am when the kids came in with us for a while we got up and ate breakfast.