Between Luke and I, we have a lot of family and friends to visit when we pop to the UK for 5 days… So it ended up being one of those trips where we needed a holiday to recover from our holiday…
We jumped on a plane and headed to Heathrow on 29 April, where we promptly missed our bus to Southampton (do not trust Egypt Air – actually do trust that they will run at least 2 hours late, no matter where they fly to). So at midnight, we had to mission around and hire a car and figure out directions to mum’s house in Hamble. This was actually surprisingly easy – it’s amazing how accustomed you get to things being incredibly difficult in Cairo (I didn’t even suffer one sense of humour failure – surprising, considering the highway that we had mapped out on a large piece of paper with the help of a very patient dude at Avis, had been closed, and then Luke decided to show me “an amazing British institution” (a petrol station) en route – which meant we got in at about 2am).
We arrived to a beautiful house over looking Hamble river filled with 4 people on about bottle of wine number 5. No problem – we joined in, and managed to get enough wine down our gullets to ensure a headache the next day…
Hamble is the most beautiful little village – completely dedicated to yachting (I had the best chocolate brownie at the yacht club cafe – a little room filled with yachties covered in water-proof everything, as it was bucketing down, and they insisted on pretending that they didn’t notice). I managed to get my hair done and have a facial without having to get in the car!
Mum lives next door to some famous football players from Portsmouth (sorry, wish I could tell you their names, but I’m just not that into it), and thought it was quite funny that Mike regularly craps on them for parking outside his front door!
Luke disappeared to visit some of his family the next day, and I went with mum and Mike to be officially introduced to Tom. Tom (or Tim, as some like to call him for no particular reason other than to wind various people up) is Stu’s horse – who is really cute! Stu popped him around some cross country jumps, and then stuck him back into his pink and grey lorry (it even has a double bed, kitchenette and dining room table) and took him home.
Then we popped off to check out Badminton - which is amazing! We watched some of the dressage, and walked the cross country course – which is just beautiful! I have never seen such fairy tale grounds before in my life – Vergelegen looks like my back yard in comparison! Absolutely breath taking, and really quite exciting to be shown around by someone in the know (not sure how Stu does it, but everyone that looked sort of official would say hi…) I also managed to purchase the most beautiful pair of woolly leather boots / wellies – and can’t wait to go somewhere cold enough for me to wear them!
Then we dashed to a pub for dinner with…. wait for it – Luke’s dad, stepmum, two half brothers, my brother, mum and mike…. So much easier to lump everyone together – and it was fairly festive.
I spent the night with Luke’s family. We went go-carting the next day (I whipped Luke’s ass – he will deny that), and then proceeded to play with Luke’s brother’s ferrets with them while Luke went to a meeting.
And then (phew, I’m getting tired just writing this down) we headed to London – picked up Dave en route in Oxford, and arrived at Brussels’ house in time to be very fashionably late for dinner with a whole crew of mates!
We ended up having the most enormous night (we both let our hair down properly – hadn’t done anything like that for a while, and it was just too much fun to be around mates again!). We were a very sorry sight heading to the airport the next day (don’t drive in London – it is not advisable if you love the person you are going to fight with when you get lost), and perhaps even sorrier when we arrived at work the next day!
But what fun!
