With the flight back to the UK almost upon us there were only two things to do – shop and go out to eat. Twice! Having started the packing process it became abundantly clear that I clearly didn’t have the right pj’s, shoes or work bag to go to the UK with. Fortunately Macy’s had some kind of crazy sale on which meant that I could stock up on all these items at truly bargain prices. So on Friday evening we went over to Bellevue for a trip to the mall and some pizza at Zeeks – our first visit to the one at Bellevue. I think that as much as we love Zeeks it will also be our last visit to the Bellevue version – it’s not quite up to the standard of Kirkland and Issaquah. On a positive side, I did manage to order the pizza that I actually wanted this time which is progress.
On Saturday it was time to watch soccer, tidy the house, watch more soccer, go to Red Robbin and then after being asked about 247 times “what time are we going to the airport?”, we went to the airport. We had booked the car into offsite airport parking and it was really rather nice! Firstly it meant we had to go south on the I-5 further than we had been before which in turn meant we had some views of Mount Rainier which we hadn’t had before. We got more of a side-on view and saw some of the foot hills. It looked mightily impressive and I’m sure it just came out to say goodbye to us.
When we arrived at the offsite parking we were pointed in the direction of where to park and unlike most airport parking facilities, as we drove to find a space a small bus followed us so we didn’t have to walk back to a bus stop with our luggage. They loaded us and our bags on and drove us to the terminal. It was all very civilized!
After getting through security with no hassle, we waited a couple of hours and then boarded the plane. BA seriously need to review their hand luggage policy – it’s clearly being abused with people bringing stupid amounts of bags and buggys and stuff onto the plane. This simply served to make the passengers grumpy as they had to wait for people to stuff it all into the overhead lockers (or whatever it’s called) and the BA staff became grumpy as they tried to force luggage in. Anyway, eventually we were all set and we were off.
After watching some TV and eating what I thought was rubbish food but Tracy and the boys liked we attempted to get some sleep. Toby did the best curling up on his seat, Tracy did pretty well despite having Harry leaning on her and I was rubbish. I was hot, sweaty and cramped and only slept for a couple of hours which is not good because I normally sleep for most of the this flight. I’ve obviously grown taller since being in America because there really wasn’t much room at all. On the plus side, the flight was only just over 8 hours so the suffering didn’t last too long!
With our bags collected from the carousel very quickly (probably because everyone else took their luggage on as hand luggage) we met Uncle Jack and drove back up to Clapham. My initial impressions of returning to England was how flat it all was! I guess I have got used to seeing mountains in every direction, so heaven alone knows what it will be like in Norfolk!
After an afternoon of catching up with everyone Tracy and I were getting tired but the boys were like duracell bunnies – they just kept on going and showed no signs of tiring. In the end (around 8pm) they were dosed up with some herbal sweets and packed off to bed. Although they weren’t overly happy about this they were very quickly zonked. Tracy and I made it until 10pm which I thought was quite impressive and then we took some sleeping pills and knocked ourselves out. The pills clearly worked because we all slept through until just after 7am when Harry appeared in our room and woke us up saying he’d heard something making a “whooshy” noise and was scared. Doesn’t matter where we are in the world, some things never change! Naughty monkey!