The return of the bums

The journey home consisted of leaving Mancora at 5pm on a bus heading to Lima to catch our flight the following evening. The flight was to Madrid and then we had a connection to make from Madrid to Heathrow. We then had a train booked for 9.30pm the following day from London to Nottingham, where we were being collected by my wonderful mother and nana.

It was a long long journey, that didn't allow for too many errors, our time allowance was 7 hours delay for the bus, so when it turned up 2 hours late we were starting to sweat a little, we then sat in numerous bus stations for what seemed like hours and didn't seem to be making much progress. I then woke up with an eye infection on the scruffy bus, with no water in the toilets and little hygiene on the bus itself. It would have been an odd end to the trip if the journey didn't go without hick ups of some sort. We eventually made it to the airport with a couple of hours to spare; our bus driver must have put his foot down!

The plane was a big disappointment, no personal TV, the tiniest seats and disgusting food, Ibarra rubbish once again, but it flew by in our exhausted states! We were delayed but just managed to arrive in time for our connection to Madrid which had been delays by two hours! I attempted my first proper Spanish argument in customs with the man who took our rum off us which resulted in me leaving my ring in the basket. Not a good move on my part!

We boarded our plane and found out that it was to be delayed even longer, it was now becoming a race against time to make our 9.30pm train, the last train to Nottingham! We were hungry, tired and edgy but we made it through arrivals with an hour and a bit to spare, 50 minutes on the tube a marks and spensers picnic for the train and off we were on the way to Nottingham, tired, relieved and already feeling a little nostalgic for what had been.

The journey ended 50 or so hours later at 11.15pm pm the 9th March, the end of the most magical year of our lives so far.