Retirement Trip .....Cut short

Apologies for the absence but Peter and I have been away on our long planned for retirement trip.  In fact we should still be away but world events have cut our trip short.

On the 16 February we left the UK amidst a storm.  Our original plan was to travel to the airport by train but on the day due to high winds and flooding our trains were cancelled. Our youngest daughter kindly volunteered to drive us to Heathrow.  It was a hairy ride, the weather was horrible. The airport was in chaos due to cancelled flights and a computer system failure so it made for an interesting few hours.

Prior to our leaving for our trip we had been worried about the risks of going to Singapore - our 3 day stopover - but as the foreign office were still saying it was ok to travel we had no choice but to go; of course we could have rerouted but the alternatives weren't much better.  Anyway we had a great time in Singapore, it was so quiet mainly just western travelers as the bulk of their normal visitors come from China.  We were able to wander about and felt safe in the knowledge that everywhere was taking precautions against the coronavirus - temperature checking and hand sanitizer when ever you arrived back at the hotel or went in anywhere.

I think we did it justice in our 3 days, visiting the Gardens by the Bay, Raffles, Chinatown and a good walk around in general.  We did notice though that lots of the bars and restaurants were closed due to lack of visitors.

We were very impressed with Singapore (apart from the humidity - oh my hair), so clean and everywhere was a riot of colour from all the plants, it must cost a fortune for the upkeep of them all and a small army to keep them watered.

The next leg of our trip was New Zealand - arriving in Christchurch on the Friday and then picking up our camper van for 38 nights on the road.  To be honest Christchurch was a blur of jet lag and I can't tell you a whole lot about it!! In fact apart from getting some lunch and a quick walk round (its still looks like a building site due to the devastating earthquake in 2016) we went back to the hotel and slept and I only took these photos.

I'll leave you there for now and continue our journey on a series of posts.  I have 5 weeks to cover and nearly 2500 photos to go through.