We have lift off

Caron had arranged to have lunch with one of her customers in the UK so we thought that we had the morning free but before we knew it, it was time to go so we did a final sweep of the house to make sure that we hadn't left anything behind and jumped in the ice-cream van for the last journey and completely forgot to check that the back doors of the van were closed. They weren't and it was only after we had done about 30km that a car pulled up next to us on the motorway and told us that the doors were open. We were on the M25 which is akin to saying that one is in a parking lot which moves occasionally so Caron jumped out and closed them noting that our two suit cases were missing. There wasn't anything of great value in them but we couldn't believe that we had been stupid enough to leave the doors open. 3 months of camping and 14500 kilometres of driving (@6.5l/100km and a cost of about 900EUR) and we lose our first items on the way to the airport on the way home. Anyway there wasn't anything we could do about it other than feel like complete idiots; we didn't have time to go back and look and even if we did, the chances of actually finding them were minimal so we just wrote it off to stupidity.

Lunch was very enjoyable and passed far too quickly. Neil and Cathy could barely hide their amusement at what we had managed to do with our baggage. Come to think of it, once we had got over that 'how could I have been so stupid' feeling there is a definitely a lot of humour in the situation.

We moved back onto the M25 parking lot and took 2 hours to get to Heathrow and had just parked when John phoned to politely inquire if we were perhaps missing two pieces of maroon luggage. The bags had fallen out in front of his neighbours house so now we have the luggage located but we have to work out a way of getting them back to South Africa.

Terminal 5 at Heathrow has a bit of a jinxed existence because there always seems to be something going wrong but we checked in and went through the security, which is getting just a tad ridiculous, and went to wait in the duty free without a problem. I left Caron in front of a TV and went looking for some kind of a toy because, thus far, Caron has been the happy recipient of all the souvenirs. Not that there are a lot of them but it would be nice to have at least one. This trip just isn't mine for souvenirs and I found a another great one for Caron but nothing for me. She is now the proud owner of a Sony eBook reader; something I have been trying for ages to get her mostly because of enlightened self interest. Each eBook that she reads means one less dead tree cluttering up our house and no pressure to build yet more bookcases. To get to our boarding ramp we had to go via tube to section B, they have two tubes in case one breaks down. They should have had three because both of them had broken down so we ended up walking all the way to section B. The jinx continues!

The flight back was completely full and Caron and I ended up sitting behind each other so i asked the person next to me if he would mind swapping with Caron. Grumble, grumble, 'this always happens to me!', long face but he kindly did the swap.