Trip to England Part 3

Since the last blog post, my time has been spent almost 100% on family meetings. I've met brothers, nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews and extended family. Coming so soon off the flight it has been a bit exhausting, but seeing I've only got 2 weeks in England there is plaenty to pack in.

It all started on Friday evening, when I had a phone call from my brother to see if I wanted to go to the pub. To an Englishman this is an irrefusible offer, so I went off to The Portsmouth Arms doing my best zombie impersonation. It's an ok pub that does decent food and pretty good beer. I was drinking Fursty Ferret for most of the night.

Besides my brother, Jon, his wife, Angie and her son Ryan, there was Craig, my nephew and his partner, Lisa and probably others I'm missing as well. A lot of the talk was about Australia, especially seeing some people had travelled there, and those that hadn't seemed to want to.

The following day was a big family gathering. So a bad time for me to wake up at about 4am thinking it was the middle of the afternoon. I had time displacement a couple of times when I travelled to Australia originally, and my jetlag was awful then. Well, althugh the jetlag isn't bad, I couldn't get back to sleep for a long while and hit the family gathering on little sleep. It was amazing to see the differences in the younger members of the family, 5 years is along time in the life of the kids. And I was even treated to seeing a new member of the family, my 4 year old grand-niece Ruby. Again, things went as if I'd hardly left and it was all very comfortable.

A very shy 4 year old Ruby, with her mum, my niece, Vanya.