After our 3-flight, 40-hour odyssey to return home on South African Airlines and Lufthansa through Jo’burg and Frankfurt, we settled into our post-trip routine. There’s always both pros and cons to arriving home.
Let’s get the bad points over with first:
- The vacation excitement is over and it’s the routine of life at home until the next trip. (Fortunately, only a month away this time.) We aren’t great at doing nothing, so we got right to work with the best remedy, planning our next trips!
- Dealing with jet lag. Westbound returns such as this one are always easier, so with some melatonin we were in pretty good shape in just 3 or 4 days.
- On this trip, there was the daunting task of sorting and posting photos. We like to do that task on the road, but the lack of internet access and the huge number of wildlife photos meant that this time the work came after our return.
- When you live in Vancouver you can almost always expect to return to rain; more rain in our first 48 hours home than on the entire 35-day trip. But we’re used to it…..
And there are some great things to be said about being home:
- Seeing family and friends again (and boring them with travel stories) is always nice.
- There’s just something good about sleeping in your own bed, with pillows that you’re used to.
- We spent our time in Africa and were away over the equinox, so days were pretty much 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of night. But here at home our days are getting longer and we are on our way to 18 hours of daylight. We love the long days, and the short days during our winter are a great excuse to fly off to someplace warm and sunny!
- Finally, we get to update our country count with two new countries that we visited for the first time.
Returning Home; the Good and the Bad