D Day

The day we often thought would never come....came! Monday 11th January 2010 our hotel shuttle bus dropped us off at Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport....we were on our way home. This is the last photo we took in the UK!

After that, the camera went away for our long trip home.

We flew from Heathrow to LA, which took about 11 hours. We had a 2 hour stop there - which was really very boring. We all had to get off the plane and go and wait in this big room. We had to be checked by immigration before being allowed to enter a secure room (we even had to apply for an online visa before we left) - all a bit silly really as it's not like we could escape the room anyway! Having kids was a bit of a bonus at this point because we got to skip the massive queue and go straight to the front! We were then back on the plane for a 13 hour flight to Auckland. I know I say this often but Leilani and Emily really were such good kids on the plane. We really didn't have any problems with them at all and they handled it all so well. They slept at different times from each other though - which didn't give us much of a chance to rest, but it did give them a break from each other.

I was actually looking forward to the flight home - some time to sit back, read, and watch movies, but I got so sick that I couldn't even do that!!!! I had a headache, runny nose and a bad fever and felt absolutely terrible. (I'm sure I had swine flu!) So I was totally stressed about how the kids would handle the flight - when in fact it was me that struggled!

Our flight must have been a little late getting into Auckland because we had to rush to make our Melbourne flight and only just made it. Three hours later we were arriving into Melbourne!

We got through immigration and customs pretty easily but then had to wait 4 or so hours for our flight to Launceston. It turned out to not be so bad - I think we were just happy to be off the plane and back in Australia!!