By What a brilliant week it has been since my last post! Returning home to Kent last Thursday seems like an age ago. On Sunday we had a family welcome home party, which was so lovely to see everyone and catch up. I received some christmas presents too – christmas in February! My mum and my sister also created an amazing cake with Doris on top – it even had a red toothpaste lid to recreate the bucket, in addition to Eduardo swimming alongside us. My mum did a speech that really got me. The worry that my family went through whilst we were at sea is something that I couldn’t bear to think about whilst on Doris, but now i’m back on land, I can’t imagine what they went through. My Aunty Linda brought a bottle of champagne for every week that we were at sea – 10 weeks! I’m definitely going to need some help to get through those! My mums partner Michael, also bought charts to chart our journey across the Pacific, and it has been awesome looking at the route we took on a larger scale!
Me and Will went for a lovely walk on Sunday morning with my sisters dog, Molly. Its just so strange looking out over the English Channel at the cargo ships coming down from the Thames into the channel heading to France. The sea is nowhere near as blue here, and its much colder, but seeing those white horses crash down onto the harbour wall sends shivers down my spine remembering what it felt like with them crashing onto our heads.
Monday took me back over to GSK for the final bit of my analysis as there wasn’t time when we were last there. It involved me getting back on an erg, and completing my V02 max testing which was as hideous as ever! But its always great catching up with everyone there, and it will be interesting to see the results when all of it is analysed.
Tuesday was the premiere which Ems told you all about in our Tuesday blog – what an awesome evening, can’t get enough of free popcorn, and the film was brilliant!
Today I also popped into see my grandma’s craft group. They have been so incredibly supportive and have raised lots for our charities. If you saw the bunting at our arrival into Marlin Marina, they also made that!
Other than that, its back to the job applications, and catching up on sleep amongst catching up with my friends and family. Bodies healing nicely, bum is still a little worse for wear, but with my concoctions of bio oil and body shop remedies hopefully these scars won’t remain forever.
On another note, on behalf of all of us we would like to give our wishes to the Toby Wallace crew and Mikes family at this terrible time, we just can’t imagine what they must all be going through. For more information please don’t hesitate to read: http://www.oceanusrowing.co.uk/news/
Unimaginably sad news, which certainly overshadows the main part of Meg’s blog post. By their nature, adventures such as ocean crossings carry risk, which adventurers try to mitigate as much as possible. Sometimes those measures do not match up to the task and those left behind have to carry the pain. We can pray for a miracle in Mike’s case but we should give thanks (and many of us have) for your safe homecoming.