Today was my last day at work for 2 weeks. I had to be in the office by 8am though for a telephone call with my SA office. I was on the tube earlier than usual which meant there were actually seats available. What does amaze (and annoy me) is that people play their music so loud that I can hear it even though they are using headphones. They must be seriously hearing impaired. This morning we had two people in our carriage with that particular disorder.

Today for me was an unusual day in London in that it was composed of a full day of training on our new company performance management system (yes I know exciting stuff). My London team was chosen (and to be fair we part volunteered) to be in the pilot project before the full roll to the whole company. It was actually a good day (believe it or not). We got free lunch. Oh wait, we get free lunch every day in the London office.

I had already left this morning we the balance of the clan arrived. They landed at Heathrow at 6:30am and were in the flat by 8:30am. Not bad for a Friday morning. Not entirely sure what they did today but when I got back at 4:30pm they were all in the flat and almost ready for us to leave for the airport again.

We are now in total 7 people with 10 pieces of luggage (which includes 2 golf bags) and that excludes the laptop bags/backpacks. We had a 7-seater van to take us to the airport and it was fully loaded. It is also a bit of a process to get checked in at the airport. We had just over an hour to kill before our flight boarded and so (of course) the ladies managed to go off and do something in-terminal shopping (yes Bryan you should start to worry soon your daughter did not come back empty handed).

We flew to Lisbon tonight (our second home country – or should be soon enough). The flight left late because of how busy Heathrow is on a Friday evening and we eventually arrived in Lisbon at 11:15pm. As Oli has a British passport she went through the EU channel and the rest of us had to wait to get our passports stamped which must have taken 10 minutes for the 6 of us. The luggage came off shortly after we got to the baggage belt. Fortunately we have booked an airport hotel (within walking distance though crossing about 10 roads on cobbles with 10 bags isn’t the easiest thing to do). Checked-in and in our rooms by about 12:30pm. Now to get some sleep – it is 1am now (and probably about 25 degrees outside still).

Until tomorrow ….

P, C (because she’s my favorite and sat next to me on the plane) H, S, M, L, O