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We've been home a week now, so perhaps it is time to finish off our blog. After an uneventful but very long flight, it was 34 hours from door to door, we arrived home at mid day on Saturday, very tired. It took four days before we were sufficiently recovered to start thinking about our next trip!
Andrew tells me that the beech hedge around our garden has just greened up, spring is very very late this year, however the garden is looking good as a result of all the rain they have had recently.


In fact it was still raining cats and dogs as we arrived home, not a great welcome!
But it is nice to be here, the house is looking good and has been well looked after while we have been away the last nine months.
During that time we have had a new roof put on, the old one, 60 years old, was worn out, and was leaking slightly in places, in fact part of the lounge ceiling had fallen shortly after we left.

The approach to our village is through a tunnel of beech trees, which are at their best at this time of the year. Some twenty years ago they were cut down, since then the council has put a preservation order on them, and they have almost grown back.

The village green is also quite beautiful at this time of the year, many of the houses are very big, having been the mansions of many very rich people from the 19th and early 20th centuries, many with live-in servants. My own bungalow is built on the land of one such house,  built for a timber importer in about 1860, so I have a number of exotic trees on my land.
We still have a railway station in Wetheral, and it was that which no doubt originally brought the nobs to live here. Of course the village has expanded a lot since those days, with infill houses on the larger plots,and new estates of 4 bedroomed houses.





It was back to work for me, to see what Andrew has been up to in the past two years while we have been away. Some things I like, some I don't. but he has done very well, and I now feel I can go away again and leave him to it. This is one of the shops, the one I started with, so it feels like home to me. We have our main office here, so I spend a lot of my time in this one.



Anne has left me to visit her mother for two weeks, so I am left to my own devices. It feels strange to have to do my own cooking etc.
We will never forget our trip, 20 months out of our lives, but we have been home a couple of times in between. During that time we have travelled 80,000 kms, (50,000 Miles), including 3000 miles off road. Betty has been fantastic, although we have made sure that she was well looked after, checked every 5000-6000 kms. She has let us down only once, when the petrol pump went, and I reckon has cost us around $30,000 to buy, maintain and fuel. That's just 35 cents a km, which I think is pretty good.
We have met so many great people as we have travelled, some of which we are still in touch with. Not least are Joanne and Percy, of Darwin, who looked after Betty on both occasions when we came home. Had they not volunteered we would have had to travel 5000kms  to Melbourne to leave the car. And of course Lee, Karen and the kids, who we spent many weeks travelling with after we met them in the Pilbara. And Mark and Judy, who we only met a couple of times, but who we have kept in touch with.We will miss them all, but hopefully we will meet again someday, perhaps visiting us here. Then of course there are our very long standing friends in Perth, David and Mildred, who we spent a month travelling in New Zealand with, and who we hope to see here sometime in the near future.
We learned that Australia is far from being all desert, and even where it is it is still interesting. Our favourite places are the ones that need an effort to get there- the Gibb River road, Cape York, and the Gulf road, and of course Ningaloo Reef, where we spent many happy hours swimming and spending time with the Jacksons. You may note that all of these are in the far north.
As for cities, well Adelaide is our favourite, followed by Melbourne. But as we hate traffic, and in that respect many of the cities are too much like home, we avoided the others like Sydney and Cairns, spending as little time as possible there. We tended to travel inland rather than the coast, the towns are far more interesting than the holiday resorts that frequent the shoreline.
Small towns- Well Alice Springs and Darwin are our favourites, both of course in Northern Territory. We have been to Darwin six times now, as we flew out and back twice, and visited a few years back also. Alice, in the red centre, has its problems, mainly with the aboriginals, but it is an attractive town with many places of interest close by.
We still don't much like Uluru, (Ayers Rock), preferring The Olgas and King's Canyon. It is far too commercial, and that spoils it for us.
When we set off on this adventure we thought it would take us six months, our actual travelling time was more like 15 months, and there are still many places we have not seen. We did manage to take in a rodeo in Aileron, just north of Alice, by we would have liked to have seen the big one in Mount Isa, the camel racing and Henley on Todd in Alice, and the Birdsville races. We just were not in those places at the right time.
So the time has come to close this blog, I shall be writing again when we decide what adventure we are to do next. I have had great pleasure keeping this account, although sometimes it has been a bit of a chore. However if I can get it into print it will be good to look back on it in our dotage, and the grandchildren will have a copy.
We wish all our readers all the very best, if you are not already in touch perhaps you would like to correspond with us through the comments box at the bottom of this page, and we will reply.