Heading Home

And so we had done it! We had made it all the way from London to Mumbai and were to head home to England so long as we made it to the airport on-time.

Ready to go... 

We had pre-booked a taxi to pick us up from the hotel at 10:00am and he was waiting for us outside to our delight. The Mumbai traffic is pretty heavy at any time of day and it took us well over an hour to get to the airport, but we had left plenty of time to get on to the flight so we were happy with the progress we had made.

As I tried to check us in the lady behind the desk acknowledged our details for the flight from Mumbai to London, but she was struggling to see us on the flight from London up to Manchester. Oh dear. Neither James nor I said anything to each other, each of us realising that it would be just our luck that we get a cancellation at the very last hurdle and have to stay a night in London or get a replacement bus service up the M1. Apparently, the flight we were booked on “for some reason wasn’t running” and our stomachs turned as our eyes rolled. Within seconds she added that there was a flight 30 minutes earlier that we would be on, so everything looked like it would be alright in the end.

The flight was about 9 hours and the plane wasn’t even half full. We amused ourselves with the in-flight entertainment and snoozed as and when we pleased. There were mixed emotions up there in the air: happy to be on the way back home to everything we know and love, but also sadness that we would be leaving behind all the adventures and cultures from other countries.

A nice drop of Shiraz on the plane back home

It wasn’t long before we were making the change to get our short flight up to Manchester and edge that one last step nearer to home. A last-minute change of gate almost threw us out of kilter, but once we were through all the security and on the plane it was…well…plain sailing from there on in. The one last potential problem that I could foresee before I could truly relax was that maybe, just maybe, our bags wouldn’t have followed us to the north-west. But they turned the corner on the carousel and we breathed a sigh of relief. We had done it!

This is the end...

Thankfully our mum and dad had agreed to meet us at the airport and it was just great to see them again after all this time away. After hugs all round we jumped in the car and made our way back home.

It still felt very weird; like we had been away for a lifetime, but yet that we hadn’t been away at all. A spot of bubbly and some Pringles later and we were absolutely ready for getting some shut-eye in our all-too-familiar beds. It was about 5 in the morning for our body-clocks so we had no problem at all in drifting off to sleep, reminiscing at all the adventures we had had in the past half a year.

Home sweet home!