Coming or Going?

Hello everybody,

The last two weeks have been a real emotional rollercoaster ride for me with more downs than ups I’m afraid to say. Starting, as you know from the blogs that Barry has posted, with our emergency call back home to Australia for the accident and death of our brother and brother in-law.

The plane flights (and the missing of some of them) have taken their toll on our poor old bodies. At this stage my body is not sure if it is coming or going. It doesn’t seem to know if it is morning or night. The stomach isn’t sure whether it is supposed to be eating breakfast, lunch or dinner.

We have spent time sleeping on the floor of some of the airports, which you expect to do quite easily at the age of 20 or 30 but not at the ages of 62 and 65. Our bones are not designed for that sort of torture. Especially mine being the princess that I am! We did however at one of the airports find a couple of chairs to sleep on, at least they were a bit softer than the floor and my hip bones said thank you.

The missing of the first plane in Ulaanbaatar brought me undone on the emotional scale. We were just so concerned about getting home as soon as we could and that put a spanner in the works. To see the plane that we were supposed to be taking sitting on the runway ready to leave as we came into land, and to know that we had missed it by such a small amount of time was devastating. If our first plane had have been on time we know we would have made it. Tears flowed for me.

After many hours of waiting, napping, changing planes and so on we finally made it home. Our time at home was, as you can all imagine, a very emotional time. We will miss Grant terribly.

There was a small upside to things though, and that was that we got to see a lot of our family and a lot of our old friends from home. People that we hadn’t seen for many years in some cases. Why is it that it has to take a tragedy to bring people together? We all should make more of an effort to catch up with people without there having to be a tragedy.

It was also great to see my family again so soon. The grandchildren especially. I also had another huge up when our daughter and her husband told us that we are going to have another grandchild. Yeah another little bubba in the family!

On the return journey we also had some interesting things happen. Will things ever really go smoothly! Due to being told the wrong time, we missed another plane! I have never missed anything before as I am pretty much a punctual freak, sometimes setting my watch five minutes fast so I can’t be late. So again there were last minute plane flight changes and more stop overs and more sleeping sitting up or on floors. What fun!

There was one little episode that was rather interesting though. On one of our flights we were trying to have a cat nap. I woke up at one stage with a hand on my leg, and I thought how nice it was of Barry to being doing that. But then I realised that Barry was sitting on my other side and the hand on my leg belonged to a complete stranger. Oh crap! What do I do now? Was he asleep too and how do I get rid of his hand? I ended up getting up and going to the toilet because there was no other way of getting rid of his hand. I had tried moving and that hadn’t worked! Even now I’m not sure what was going on! Girls he was quite a good looking young guy dressed up in a suit and all! He must have been blind, and the lights were off. Ha ha!

We are now in Russia and have caught up with Alan and Lynn. It’s good to see our friends again. We will resume our travels tomorrow. I didn’t like the hand washing though today. Yuk!

Bye for now will post more blogs later if I can. So many people have said they want to follow us and that is so wonderful. Talk again soon.

Donna (Princess Mumma Bear)