Annual ramblings below: see last entry for November
Home again. The last couple of days on board were pleasant and largely uneventful: we did a few more quizzes, went to another excellent piano recital by young Matthew McCombie and took in the performance of the guest choir. (We’ve muttered about joining, but haven’t plucked up the courage yet!). As for the seas, we lost a lot of sleep on our first night out of Lisbon when the sea was probably the roughest we’ve experienced. Stabilisers notwithstanding, the QV rolls a fair bit! It settled down a bit once we were round Cape Finisterre (the Spanish one) and into the relative calm of the Bay of Biscay.
The guest population of the ship was even more like that of a care home this time: we were forever tripping up over sticks, elbow crutches, walkers, wheelchairs and the Hell’s Grannies’ electric scooters. And an alarming number of couples seemed to spend a lot of time bickering and sniping at each other. I do hope this isn’t the shape of things to come. Oh well: we met lots of nice, cheerful people too, and have expanded the Christmas card list a little.
Before we left the cabin this morning I’d logged in from my phone to the clever contraption in the hall here at Forges-l’Evêque and cranked up the temperature. The house was therefore nice and warm to return to, although you could tell from the feel of stuff in cupboards that the house hadn’t been heated to normal temperatures for best part of a fortnight.
The drive home was pretty rotten: it started badly with road works closing the exit road from the terminal, hence a long crawl round the port before we could emerge to dice with the Southampton traffic. Road works on the M27 slowed the pace, as did breakdowns on the Guildford by-pass and the M25. It took us two and a half hours to get to Fortnums in Sevenoaks for the shopping, and then we had a number of detours to get home: there seems to have been quite a downpour, and one of our usual roads was closed. There was much flooding in the fields, and we’d to crawl through patches of flooding on the roads as well. Anyway, we’re home and dry, and have opened a huge stack of Christmas cards in one go!
Much as we love our travels, we’re happy to be back in our own comfortable space.
The guest population of the ship was even more like that of a care home this time: we were forever tripping up over sticks, elbow crutches, walkers, wheelchairs and the Hell’s Grannies’ electric scooters. And an alarming number of couples seemed to spend a lot of time bickering and sniping at each other. I do hope this isn’t the shape of things to come. Oh well: we met lots of nice, cheerful people too, and have expanded the Christmas card list a little.
Before we left the cabin this morning I’d logged in from my phone to the clever contraption in the hall here at Forges-l’Evêque and cranked up the temperature. The house was therefore nice and warm to return to, although you could tell from the feel of stuff in cupboards that the house hadn’t been heated to normal temperatures for best part of a fortnight.
The drive home was pretty rotten: it started badly with road works closing the exit road from the terminal, hence a long crawl round the port before we could emerge to dice with the Southampton traffic. Road works on the M27 slowed the pace, as did breakdowns on the Guildford by-pass and the M25. It took us two and a half hours to get to Fortnums in Sevenoaks for the shopping, and then we had a number of detours to get home: there seems to have been quite a downpour, and one of our usual roads was closed. There was much flooding in the fields, and we’d to crawl through patches of flooding on the roads as well. Anyway, we’re home and dry, and have opened a huge stack of Christmas cards in one go!
Much as we love our travels, we’re happy to be back in our own comfortable space.
No comments:
Post a Comment