2005-08-20: Settlers

Now I am settling down to enjoy doing nothing (and hopefully not spending money doing it). Edyta and I have returned to England. We had a marathon effort in moving about 70 kg of luggage from Clapham South to Swindon. The first step was finding where Kelly lived so we could grab our luggage. It wasn't too hard, except when I emerged from the train station expecting maybe a T-junction and instead found a five road intersection with several other roads feeding into it. The real challenge then came in moving the above mention luggage. First Kelly lives four levels up off the ground. That is a lot of steps to be hauling a 35 kg bag down, but luckily gravity was on my side. Later, when I had 18 kg of bag on my shoulders, I got to lift that bag up steps. And down steps. And up steps. For an underground network the Tube sure has a lot of steps between platforms and very little support for moving luggage.

Once at our new temporary house of Stanier Street, Swindon (and having hauled the bags up the steepest and narrowest stairs of the journey), we then dashed off to find internet to see how over taxed my credit card was and to buy something to sleep in tonight. Luckily the library was open so I had the ability to withdraw money again. So we then went shopping for our first home cooked meal in some ten days, spaghetti bolognaise.

Yesterday before we left Poland we went for a walk amongst some more of the suburbs. And some shopping. Then we flew to Vienna. With some time to kill between planes we decided to take the train into Vienna. Then half-an-hour later we were back on the train to the airport. In that time we saw another European city. I had a photo taken in front of a statue of some guy on horseback. Don't know who or why, but it was right on the point where we had to return for the train.

To get a sandwich we converted our zloty to euro, which saw 130 zl shrink to 18 euro, and then 5 was lost on a couple of sandwiches.