Stranded in Cyprus - Coming home!

Usually when you have completed your holiday you 'come home' or 'return home'. However when your return is delayed because of a crisis you don't just 'come home', oh no, you get 'repatriated'. Sounds rather melodramatic doesn't it?

We are being repatriated this evening. Our repatriation flight is at 9.30pm local time (7.30pm UK time). Which means we will arrive back at Manchester airport around midnight (UK time). It's quite a relief to have a time-scale to work to. It means we can just relax the rest of the day and enjoy the hotel facilities. However, we are confined to barracks - not allowed to leave the hotel premises in case things change at short notice and our flight is brought forward. We have been told to check the notice board every couple of hours for updates so it does feel a bit like being on probabtion and having to report in regularly. At least they don't want to electronically tag us so they know where we all are!

Although we are a bit sad to be leaving, we've settled in pretty well now, it will be nice to get home for the weekend and have a couple of days to get back to normal before a new working week. My eldest son is clearly getting a bit bored because his Maths teacher e-mailed him some advanced maths questions (integration apparently) this morning and he's done them already!

It may now be possible for us to attend a karate seminar on Saturday that we thought we would be missing (although we would have to travel all the way back to Manchester to do it!) so we will have to see how we feel about that on Saturday morning. I'll also be able to go to my kobudo class on Sunday evening - my instructor was supposed to be on a jujitsu course in Norway this weekend but he's e-mailed me to say that's cancelled because of the volcano so the class will be on.

Hopefully I will next be updating you from the comfort of my own home!

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