Heading South!

Wow. We have finally got here. After 4 months of planning and organisation and over 10,000 miles of travelling we finally made it from the hot sands of Doha to the wintry climes of the South Atlantic Falkland Islands.

Getting here was a bit of an epic journey over 2 days of travelling. While I have been reasonably well traveled over the last few years, I was quietly dreading the marathon we were about to undertake. As it turned out, the drive up to Oxford on Saturday was probably the worst part! Saturday is changeover day during the madness of the Summer holiday season in Cornwall. By travelling up on the Saturday we were going to be stuck in the middle of the weekly mass exodus of holiday-makers out of the Southwest.  And stuck we were… in fact we were at a standstill only 20 minutes into the journey. Great! This set the tone for the rest of the journey, and 8 hours of traffic jams, driving rain, poor visibility and monotonous boredom later, we finally arrived at RAF Brize Norton.

We stayed the night in Gateway House at Brize. Basic but comfortable (and cheap!), and with plenty of time to kill on Sunday, we were able to take in some of the beauty of the local surrounding area. This area has a very English countryside beauty about it - very different to the rugged wildness of the Cornish coastline. The surrounding villages and towns would sit quite happily on the front of a postcard and it was a shame we did not have more time to take such views in.

Stage 2 of the journey South was scheduled to begin at 11.59 pm on Sunday night. We were all pretty tired from the agonizing car drive the previous day, so God knows what we were going to feel like on arrival in the Falklands. I had purchased Max Brooks' World War Z to read on the plane, so images of zombie-like, sleep deprived, stiff and achy passengers emerging from the plane were springing to mind. We had all deliberately not got any sleep during the day, in the hope of sleeping more easily on the overnight portion of the coming flight. By the time we were in the departure lounge we were all definitely ready to sleep – that is apart from Evie, who was going wild in the soft play area… I'm not quite sure where she was finding the energy from mind you.  The last thing we wanted to be hearing at this point was there was a delay on the flight by an hour.

To be fair the flight, in the end, was not really that bad. Yes, it was long and of course there were times of boredom and lack of comfort. Any glimmer of a hope of being able to utilize more than 1 seat was extinguished by the number of people in the departure lounge waiting for the same flight – it was busy with a mixture of civilians on their way back to the Falklands and military personnel on their way to Mount Pleasant. Getting decent rested sleep in an upright seated position is near impossible, and being confined in a small space for 19 or so hours made me sympathetic to the plight of caged zoo animals. However, we did have a surprising amount of space compared to many flights I have been on, were fed well at regular intervals and did have a swanky preloaded I pad to entertainment us. What really did help was the short stop at the volcanic and barren island of Ascension; yet another island relic from the British colonial past. We were able to get off here and stretch our legs in the fresh air for a couple of hours. This definitely served as a welcome break in the journey. Only another 8 hours to go…

"Bloody hell, it's windy!"

First impressions on leaving the plane were dominated by the strength of the wind and the difference in temperature, which was significantly cooler than the temperature we had left in the UK. At least the sun was shining (for the moment).  We were met by my new head teacher, Karen and were then driven to our new home. We had done our research on the Falklands, so the poor nature of the roads and the barren outlook of the landscape unfolding around us were not a surprise. What was a pleasant surprise however, was the inside of our new home – the size, finish and comfort was much more than we were expecting. This surprise was mirrored by the girls, who had already set about apportioning out the bedrooms. For me exhaustion was seriously setting in now. All I could think about right at this moment was where was the kettle?