Monday, October 22, 2012

The beginning of the end

Since our last update we have alternated between relaxing and sorting our gear out for the return trip home.  It’s just not as easy as it was with coming over here, to start we don’t have our lovely garage to dry and clean Mildred in.   Nor do we have room to spread all our gear out to pack in a sensible fashion.

We stayed near Maidstone and went to visit the Leeds Castle on our way to London. 





Last night we camped in the East London suburbs, today we had to drive to West London suburbs, Ruislip to be precise.  It took us OVER 2 hours to do this mainly in traffic jams, heavy fog and taking the ring road at central London to avoid the Congestion charge of £10, passing by Kings Cross and Regent Park.



The camp had warnings out to not leave your footwear outside as the local fox will steal only one of any pair of shoes left outside.  The squirrels were everywhere gathering, then burying the chestnuts that fell from the trees which we were camped under, making for great entertainment.
So today we dropped off our nicely cleaned bikes, bike carrier, tent, and outdoor chairs to the freighters, then we steam cleaned Mildred at the nearby garage and headed to our camp 20 minutes away.



Daryl, bless his little heart, thought we would spend a few hours finishing the cleaning and packing our contents….we ended up semi finishing our jobs in the dark!   It took ages to remove each wheel, clean the wheel, suspension, chassis, etc before moving to the next one.   Also our gear had to be packed, and itemised for Customs documents.  We used a hairdryer to dry out the poptop canvas and still have our sun canopy to dry out, due to the fog that London is currently experiencing (wouldn’t it be a bugger if our plane home was cancelled due to fog!)
Now we have a short list of jobs in the morning, our final load of washing is now in the dryer and it’s nearly 10pm. 









It will be another early start in the morning to finish our jobs and get Mildred back to the freighters all stiflingly clean and shiny by 9am.  Then we will take the tube to our Hotel in Paddington, coming back on Friday to supervise Mildred’s containerisation and departure from London.

 Friday is Daryl's birthday so later we are hitting the town for a Dicken's Pub Crawl.

Tomorrow night will be the first time we have slept in a building for over 170 days!

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