Goodbye Fair England

In the end I didn't cry as much as I thought I would. That's what you get when you are trying to pack up 20 years of your life, being a good wife and mother (pasta three night running) and stupidly agreeing to teach a final few dance classes with a three month old baby at home. Crazy? Yes. Tears? A little.
What really got me going was looking around our lovely, empty house for the last time and seeing that there were no bags hanging on the hooks in the hallway. Nothing. Then the tears in the car in front of the driver taking us to Heathrow.

I guess in the end you start to think about the beginning and I remembered the goodbye tears - but in reverse.  When I first left Australia for England at 22 years of age. Naive but ready for adventure. And no idea at all. Really completely no idea.  David and I threw away the commonsense handbook of travelling around Europe and did our own thing. As young people do.  And it was full of ridiculous situations like having to hand over our passports at a youth hostel in order to get a pot to cook our rice in. And another for the vegetables.
Filling up our petrol tank in Austria, only to find that the petrol station did not take cards (!?) and they were not going to let us go for a few days until the banks opened.  What a lovely very white Christmas we had getting stuck in the snow and spending the coldest night of our lives CAMPING in Florence on New Years Eve.

So dear friends, there were tears in the end, for all the lovely things I will miss about England. Especially you guys reading this now.