Home in the UK
7th November 2013 - 30th January 2014
As usual our break at home in the UK was a continual whirl of grandchildren, friends and family.
Highlights included hiking with friends and on our own, to enjoy the beautiful scenery where we live.
Off
on a hike with Jane
The
sheep all give us a hard stare!
We managed to find time for a trip down to Caerleon to visit friends Dave, Silke, Ben and Max and managed to choose the day when there was a special event day at the local Roman Museum. Together we enjoyed solving a roman murder mystery and watching a gladiator fight. The small people even got to try on the Roman armour for themselves.
Waiting
for the gladiator fight
Junior
Romans
Then it was school Christmas play season.
Before we knew it Christmas was upon us.....
Decorating the house
Making Dinner
Get-together
with the cousins.
Walking
off dinner.
We stayed home a little longer than usual, through the month of January. This gave us time to carry out some home improvements, replacing a couple of windows. We also took a trip to Swansea to see our friend Trish and enjoyed the chilly beach!
The
view we never normally see, where the bathroom window used to be!
On
the beach with Trish
Our journey out to Florida didn't start well. We got up at 4 am ready to catch the 5.18 train to the airport to be greeted with an e-mail stating that our flight was delayed by 2 hours. Not to worry, the train was pre-booked, so we caught it anyway. However on arrival at the airport we were told the flight was cancelled and nobody could understand why we'd been sent that e-mail, as they already knew at 2 am that the flight was cancelled due to snow in Atlanta, Georgia, a weather event so unusual it had thrown the schedules into chaos.
We could have stayed home if we'd known, we complained. Our sympathetic Delta agent took pity on us and checked us into the fancy airport hotel, at their cost. So, we enjoyed a night in luxury at the Radison Blu, complete with three meals, courtesy of Delta.
Nicely refreshed the next morning we set off on our amended travel itinerary. First we were to fly to Amsterdam, totally the wrong direction, where we were booked on a flight to Atlanta. We arrived in Amsterdam to discover that the plane we were to catch had developed a fault. A night in Amsterdam perhaps we hoped?
It turned out we weren't to get to enjoy the sights of Amsterdam as the plane got fixed within an hour and we were soon boarding in Business Class, yippee. So, for our nine hour flight we enjoyed the champagne lifestyle, fancy food served on china plates with real knives and forks, seats which converted into beds complete with duvet and pillows. They fed us so well, we feared we might burst.
All that food sustained us through our unplanned three hour wait at Atlanta airport, where we discovered that, although our plane to Jacksonville was sitting at the gate, there was no crew to fly it until 10.30 pm that night, a knock-on effect of the snow chaos. We sat and waited patiently until 10 pm, when we were finally told the flight was cancelled.
With a little help from the friendly ground staff, who took pity on us after our 50 hour journey, we managed to get seats on a flight to Jacksonville, which arrived at 1.30 am the next morning. By that time our poor friends Robin and Kierra were regretting their generous offer to pick us up at the airport.
Finally we reached Florida........