Our journey home for a brief session of house maintenance and catching up with various administrative tasks went very smoothly – bus from yacht club to station, train to Hamburg, flight to Luton, train to Hinckley and taxi home. The only downside as far as Ted was concerned was sharing a carriage with a group of junior school age children, who appeared to be completely unsupervised. They were certainly lively, but as I pointed out to him, the logo on one little boy’s sweatshirt probably applied – “If it’s too noisy …..You’re too old”.

After 3 intense days catching up, we were setting out on the return journey – the reverse of the outbound journey and the first time we had travelled on the hourly bus that runs past our house. This time we were also carrying all the things we had bought while at home to enable a few running repairs to the boat, so bags were quite a bit heavier. No marks at all to Luton airport departures – we were crammed into one lounge with no opportunity to go to the departure gate (where we could have sat down on a seat instead of the floor) because they didn’t announce the gates until the last possible moment.  When we had finally been told a gate, after waiting there for some time, we were told it had changed to one at the other end of the airport. Eventually we were in the air and not delayed enough to jeopardise catching the train at Hamburg back to Stralsund.

The day following our return was spent fitting all the things we had brought with us and doing various other jobs that hadn’t been managed before we left. It was a really hot day so we didn’t bother cycling to the supermarket, instead planning to eat at the yacht club and sort out buying food the next day. When we went up there it turned out to be being used for a member’s 60th birthday party but Wolfgang (the birthday boy) welcomed us and said we should be his guests, so we were able to eat delicious food and drink at his expense and we had a fantastic evening. A group of his friends had come from near Dusseldorf and they spoke excellent English. It was very interesting to hear a West German perspective on the reunification after talking to Antje the previous week. It was certainly later than we had planned by the time we got to bed.

Club members had dinghies as well as yachts. It was good to see an OK after all these years. His son had one with a reduced rig, which I hadn’t seen before.

Sadly I didn’t have my camera with me when we were invited to the party