12 August (Julia's reflections)

We’re home now and typically I’m enjoying a bit of jetlag, so thought I’d take this quiet opportunity to reflect on the trip.

Firstly I feel so lucky………lucky to have been able to do this trip in the first place, physically, financially and because of the support from home – from the kids looking after our gorgeous dog Rufus to our awesome staff.  Alex, Kim and Jessie, we can’t thank you enough!

Lucky because of the people we met along the way.  Long lost friends and relatives and complete strangers opening their homes to us.  Having fantastic ‘face to face’ conversations is just so much more satisfying than emails, texts or phone calls or their modern day equivalent like Snapchat and Instagram – although I’m not really qualified to comment on the latter as I haven’t used them yet.

And lucky to have Pete to experience all these things with.  I’m so glad he feels the same way I do about travel.  We both love to take the road less travelled (although Pete would like it tarsealed and bump-free all the way thank you!), taking things slowly so we can take it all in.  Cycling is just such a good way to do it as you don’t have to carry all your belongings on your back, it’s cheap, you have transport and accommodation sorted and you are accessible to the land, it’s people and the flora and fauna you pass along the way.  You can stop wherever you like for your photos and if the view changes, you can easily stop and just snap another photo.  Travelling in cars, buses and trains for a lot of our final week brought this home to me.  It is not quite so easy to pull a car over to the side of the road, right where you want to take your photo.  And you certainly can’t pull a bus or train over where you want to.

We finished our tour on a great note.  After bidding goodbye to all Pete’s old friends (and my new ones!) and his fantastic Merseyside relatives (it was great to see you all again and actually meet two I’d never met before!), we caught a train to Euston as we had given the bikes a thorough clean at Peg and Andy’s and didn’t want to get them dirty before the trip home.  We had booked a train to Heathrow but found you couldn’t take the train on the Underground, which I suspected even though I live in NZ but the booking agent seemed to think was possible!  Managed to get a refund on those tickets however when we got to Euston (that saved us 51 quid!), so we googled a route to get us the 35 km to Heathrow.  Good old Google Maps showed us a route which was 90% along the canal towpaths of London so we had very little traffic to negotiate which was a good thing as we’d decided not to bring Pete’s helmet home as it is well past it’s use by date.

So to finish our trip we had a lovely ride along the canals on a beautiful sunny London day with most of the surface sealed and even when it wasn’t sealed, at least it was still pretty smooth.  The canal paths were being quite well used by cyclists and walkers alike and our navigating was a bit tricky at one stage with one section of the towpath having been closed off, but we managed.  We thought how easy it would be to wind up in the canal and were actually following a couple of girls on their bikes when one of them did just that.  She was trying to move her bike from one track in the grass to a parallel one and just hit the ridge in the middle and went flying into the canal along with her bike!  Luckily she wasn’t hurt and I was able to give her one of my shirts at least.

Riding on a double decker bus through London with Steve

Gotta love the Old English pubs!

Syon Park Manor as viewed as we walked along the Thames

Thanks for a great day Steve.

It was a lovely ride and much more enjoyable than negotiating our way through busy, smelly train stations.  We had a lovely catch up with Steve while we were in London, walking along the Thames and sampling a brew or two in some of the beautiful pubs that England do so well.  He also came to Heathrow to have a drink with us before we got on the plane which is where we ran into Anne and Kim Bloxham from New Plymouth!  We go to yoga with Anne and our daughter Georgina went to school with their twin daughters.  Love those chance meetings and it brings home the fact that this world is a small place.  If there’s one thing this trip has shown us, it’s the world is full of beautiful people who all pretty much want the same things – respect and kindness to them and those things and people they love.  Travel helps to make this happen.   It opens our minds and lets us see things from a new perspective.  

Pete labels the boxes for the flight home.

Our good luck continued when we eventually arrived back in NZ.  Firstly we had our very dear friend Sharon take time out of her day to come and have a coffee with us while we were waiting for our flight to New Plymouth.  Then we had sensational weather for our flight home, got to see the three mountains covered in snow in the middle of the North Island as we flew down to Taranaki and saw our own majestic mountain, fully clad in snow and clear of clouds, standing proudly above the green fields of our home province. 

Even though our kids couldn’t make it to the airport (one was in Wellington, the other was skydiving in Taupo), we had our friend and manager Alex bring our car out to the airport and three of our four parents at the airport to meet us.  Life is short and you never know how long you have left with your parents so I am always very glad and grateful to have them here waiting for us when we return.

My 87 year old Dad then drove me to see my 83 year old Mum who is in a retirement home hospital suffering from the late stages of dementia.  She is a shadow of her former self, but she was still here for me and for that I am extremely grateful.  I am also incredibly glad that even though Mum and Dad divorced over thirty years ago, they still get on well together.

We took Mum for a short walk in her wheelchair and then helped her into bed as she needed a sleep and then home to see my beautiful skydiving daughter and our gorgeous big hairy dog.  A lovely walk on Fitzroy beach as the sun went down was the perfect way to be welcomed back to New Plymouth.

Man it’s good to be home!