Back in the UK (yes I skipped a bit and yes I am still behind)

As I am terrible at catching up with this, I am going to change what I am doing.  I had been hoping to finish off the Contiki entries etc and keep everything in chronological order.  That turns out to be wishful thinking and I am just getting further and further behind.  So I am going to let you in on a secret… I survived my Contiki trip and am still alive.  I am doing pretty well actually.  Quite busy even, which is why I am struggling to try to catch up.  So the rest of the Contiki entries will appear and they will be labelled so you know what they are, but I will also try to keep up with what I am doing at the moment.

So just over a month ago I got back to London.  What I did for the first few days I was back will be covered in the Contiki series.  Basically I had three days in London having fun with people remaining from the Contiki trip.

Moving on from that I caught up with family in the UK.  Mum has a cousin living in Kent who I thought that I should impose myself on for a few days to rest, recover and catch up with them.  Having not the cousin for a few years and having not met any of the family I thought that this would be an appropriate use of my time.  My few days with them turned into about a week and life snowballed from there.

I took a coach (bus) from London down to Canterbury.  I had been going to take the train down, but after looking at the differences the bus won out easily.  Although it was slightly slower, it was much much cheaper.  I had limited money and plenty of spare time, so the bus it was.  After getting to Canterbury I hunted down a smaller bus to take me to Herne Bay.  When you have no idea how everything works, a dead phone and everything is closed, this is harder than it first sounds.  Eventually I made it and was collected by Mum’s cousin and my second cousin who happened to be visiting for the day.

Staying in Herne Bay turned out to be less about relaxing and more about trying not to let the storm that was going through the house trip you up.  It turns out that they were due to move house.  So my time for the first couple of days was split between arguing with banks and packing and moving a pair of lifetimes worth of belongings.  A few days later and both issues had been successfully negotiated.  It was time for a break.  Mum’s cousin was going to housesit at a farm cottage in rural Kent.  Between the promise of idyllic country life for a few days and the rumoured whisper of a possible job there, I headed to the countryside…