Moving House

A new dawn will start for us this Friday when we move to our 'new' home with new friends and neighbours. They say one of the biggest upheavals in anyone's life is to have a death in the family, a divorce or moving house but Peter and I have been for the past two weeks gradually moving there and not in one go as most people tend to do, this has made the task easier and pleasant. I have already moved the most delicate things like my china cupboard with all my precious Lladro figurines and my Wedgewood dinner set plus the Venecian chandellier which had to be disasembled piece by piece from our present ceiling and then I carefully washed each individual piece and delicately packed it, then it was transported over there and the electrician assembled it again and hunged at our new home, it took a whole day but it was worth it, as it looks simply marvellous. The new beds are also there, so today I will go to make the beds with the new bed linen and place the curtain poles in the bedrooms. Some clothes and furniture have already been transported there, so we can say we are half way done as we can comfortably stay there as it is right now. We are lucky in the sense that there will be more space at the new home than we have here right. The only hicup his been British Telecom who have already transferred my private line to the new house, or at least is in limbo as is neither here nor there since the telephones have not yet been connected at the new house so I'm incomunicado until the beginning of May. We have been promised by BT that we can retain the same telephone numbers so I hope that goes through alright as I have no desire to remember another set of three different telephone numbers. I think we will be very happy there as we already have friends and the last time we went to our new home we were made welcomed by a really nice group of ladies with whom we shared a joke and a laugh and we were informed that there will be a street party to celebrate the Royal Wedding in front of our home! I feel so happy to hear about this, as I have never been to a street party before. Everything here seems to be so unreal and happy. The town is self-sufficient as everything seems to be either in front of our home, along the road, behind our home (like the doctor's surgery) or around the corner. It is simply fantastic! this lovely market town is located at the foot of a castle where the views are of outstanding natural beauty. It also has a small museum where you can see the inside of a real house and how it used to be furnished long ago, with interesting memorabilia of the people who has lived there over the centuries and how life used to be then. The museum is run by volunteers. There are so many things to do as they have a calendar with lots of activities throughout the whole year and I can learn to do things I always wanted to do, like grow strawberries and cucumbers in an alotment for fun. There are cinema days where for a couple of pounds you can see a film and just across the road a new French restaurant has just opened too. The owner is French and he has a good reputation as a cheff since he owns another restaurant at a nearby town so this is very good news. Visitors come here every summer and I over-heard a lady saying: 'There aren't very many towns like this one left. It is such a pretty and quaint town that I wish I could live here' I just felt doubly lucky that we are going to move there this Friday, only two days to go! I'm so excited and the weather has turned sunny and pretty today with limpid blue skies. I can't believe our good luck!

My ADVENTURES IN MEXICO

Have you ever gone through the feeling that this might be your last day alive ? Well, that happened to us on the way to Merida. When I saw that we were going to board a small airplane on a pitch dark tarmac taxiway as we walked towards this plane, I said to Peter: ' haven't I told a thousand times that I hate small planes ? “ He didn't answer me. When we boarded, I noticed there weren't any lights inside this plane, just in the pilot's cabin and I counted 20 passengers in the dim light that came from the runway lights outside. We took off alright, the weather was very bad, furious winds and rain battered the small plane and at one point it felt like if the plane was going to flip upside down as it had already flipped sideways as
I could tell we were not flying straight; we had to hold on to the seat in front in order not to slip out of our seats and the wings of the plane were tilted sideways. When things couldn't get worse they did: We hit turbulence, bad turbulence and the plane was shaking like a milk shake in a can. I looked at Peter and instead of being scared I got cross with Peter and asked him: What airline is this? He replied: 'Maya Airlines' then suddenly the little plane plunged 100 feet in free fall; it looked like the pilots couldn't get any control of this sudden plunge and gust of wind. Everyone in the plane was screaming. I watched the pilots in the cockpit crossing themselves and I thought to myself: when even the pilots are crossing themselves it’s not boding too well. Then I turned to Peter and still cross at him I told him: You realize we are also going to fly over the Bermuda Triangle where ships and planes disappear without a trace and we are also flying with an airline no one has ever heard of, where small planes frequently fall of the sky like mosquitoes around here, we won't even appear in the news, no one will know where the hell we are. I thought about my friend Robert who doesn't like airplanes and Hector and our new house that I would not see finished and then I started thinking how we could survive if the airplane went down, thinking that maybe airplanes should have a large parachute in case it failed. The flight seemed interminable after what it seemed an eternity the weather got better and we could finally see the lights below of the city of Merida.
Phew! it looked like if everything was going to be fine after all. When we landed in Merida I heard a passenger saying she would have been better off travelling in a third class bus with the chickens! She thought that would have been a lot safer than this flight. If that was her first flight I'm sure it put her off for ever but I think I would have sooner travel in third class with the chickens had I known what an awful flight this was going to be.