West Sussex  - UK

Monday morning saw us heading down to Sussex in our old Citroen. It was over a year since we had last seen our house so we made the journey with a mixture of excitement and trepidation of what we would find.

Whatever state it was in we couldn't dwell too long as next day we had to drive all the way back to Liverpool in a hire van to pick up our and Ruth's stuff. After one last night with Mike & Liz we then drove back to Sussex, 600 odd miles in three days, from Africa to white van man in less than a month, such is life.

Before returning South we drove over to see Mum for one last time. It was very hard leaving her again, especially now she is in the care home. All our married lives we had been saying farewell to family and friends as we disappeared off on yet another overseas jaunt so we are well used to this sort of situation. 

After what we went through only a year ago with Sue's Mum & Dad we no longer took anything for granted and as Mum is over 94 it was a real worry that this could be the last time we would see her.

However, we had just nine days left to sort out our house, hire a new letting agent, rearrange all our stuff in storage and see the Doc and Dentist before flying back to Zambia so we had no choice but to bite the bullet and hope for the best.

We found our house needed a good clean and the garden was in dire need of some TLC. The Littles had moved out without re-filling the oil tank and paying what they owed for the rent and phone plus some things were missing or broken but it could have been worse!

Our storage unit was already stuffed to the gunnels so we needed to hire another unit for a few days to temporarily store the extra stuff until a larger unit became available at the end of the week then transfer both units into one, all in one day, no easy task.

Even then to create enough space we had to resort to throwing out all of our mattresses so it looked like we would be spending a few nights on our sofa bed on our next return.

Our final task before taking the van back was to drive into London to deliver Ruth's stuff to her flat in Tooting. Luckily where she and J live is a fairly straight run down the A23 from our place so with J's help we had it all done in a few hours.

The weather all week was hot so it was very tempting to spend  all day in the garden. In lieu of charging for a gardener the Littles had promised they would look after it but it now looked like a jungle in places. The whole plot is an acre and normally we really enjoy looking after it but time was precious at the moment so we could ill afford the couple of days we spent giving it a makeover as other enjoyable things such as socialising and golf suffered.