The Long Road Home

We closed the door on Paris at 8.05 am Thursday morning and walked to the train station, Chatelet Les Halles to catch RER B to Charles de Gaulle airport. Our bags were heavy as hell. We weighed in at 95 kg all up for four checked in bags, one for each of us plus Andrew thinks we would have had at least 30 kg in our carry on bags. Andrew had the laptop in his carryon backpack and the ham and cheese baguettes I prepared for our snack and I had my cabin bag. It took us 20 long minutes to drag our bags to the station. We bought train tickets (€28) and minutes later were heading to the airport.

Everything went smoothly with checkin and we were ready and waiting in the departure lounge a good hour and a half before the flight. Ella and Samuel were both excited to be going home and said it was a good day for them. Flying scares me. When you consider the size of the aircraft and the number of people they carry one wonders how the planes stay up in the air? I try not to think about it…it’s too terrifying. It was a long, long flight. Ella was the only one who managed to get some sleep for a couple of hours from Paris to Singapore. She’s so little. She curled up into a ball in her seat and dozed off and she was quite sprightly when we landed at Singapore. The rest of us were red-eyed and very tired.

We’re all happy to be going home. The last 2 ½ months of on-the-road travelling has really worn us out. The kids have hated it. I love France but I don’t know when we will come back again. We want to visit other countries when we go overseas next time but I doubt we would go overseas for such a long time again.

It’s a real learning experience when you travel. You find out a lot about yourself and also about the practicalities of travel. A big one for us is to take less stuff next time. We carried way too much stuff with us that we didn’t need. It was a nightmare.

Physically Andrew and I feel like wrecks. He has to see a doctor about his shoulder which hasn’t been right since April. He thinks it’s because of all the luggage we’ve been carrying around.