What was meant to be 90 days of travel became 94 days of adventure. If you’d like to read each day in chronological order, then start at the First Post and work your way forward from there. The link to the next day (starting with It’s Cold Outside) can be found at the top right of each post. Enjoy!

Our journey home was full of passengers being repatriated in various degrees of dishevellement.  There was a hint of tension in the air.  In the back of everyone’s mind was the possibility that the plane might fall out of the sky at the hands of Eyjafjallajoekull.  On touchdown, everyone clapped the captain for a smooth landing.  With the tension released, the passenger behind us fainted as he was fetching his bags from the overhead locker!

Everything you need to know once you've landed at Heathrow

We were expecting fanfare and news crews on arrival at Heathrow but it was just another ordinary day.  With UK airspace having been open for over 18 hours, it was clearly old news.

Cherry blossoms in sunny Sunningdale

It was nice to get back to the normality of school days, washing machines, Max’s experimental wasp trap in the garden and Bob’s tasting session with goji berries and pumpkin seeds.

Maybe our three travel outfits belong in the bin rather than the washing machine

Watch out, wasps ... Max is about!

Max and Bob

By the end of the day, we felt like we’d never been away …

Two is better than one

Eleven hours on a plane?  Pah!  No problem.  All we needed was one chicken tikka massala, one beef stroganoff, two glasses of red wine, two Kit Kats, two Twixes, one Mars Bar, four films, one chapter of Kane and Abel and a coronation chicken sandwich just before landing (presumably rehashed leftovers from lunch) and hey presto, we’re there!  Landing on top of a mountain at 7,000ft+ was somewhat bilious and we almost saw our coronation chicken for the second (or is that third?) time, but finally we arrived safely in Mexico City.

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Day 1″]

So is there a difference between an authorised taxi and an unauthorised taxi?  Either way, we found our way to Hotel Casa Gonzalez for a reasonable fare and flaked out after having frantically learnt to conjugate some emergency Spanish verbs for a few moments in bed.  Our attempt to get a taxi to the right destination flagged up a small schoolboy error in that it seems we can neither understand nor speak any Spanish, at least, not the Spanish that the Mexicans speak!

Aunty Audrey waves us off

Arrived down South to a champagne send-off courtesy of the Armstrongery complete with a compulsory Sunday dinner with a perfectly cooked uber-helping of roast beef.  It turns out that the copious quantity of meat we were happily subjected to was no coincidence.  Dave warned us that we would be eating nothing but refried beans for the next 35 days so we feasted on a “last supper” of red meat, roasted, not fried … and cooked only once.

Frozen Canal

Sunny days, here we come.  Enough said …

Can’t wait!