Day 80→82, Saturday→Monday 2→4/6 (Journey back home):

We awoke to our last day in France. We spent the morning organising our luggage for the trip back and cleaning out the car. I went with Evelyne to buy some goat cheese at a goat farm we had visited on my previous trip. After a very nice French style lunch, we set off for the airport. The navigating was easy with the GPS pointing us in the correct direction right up until the last bit. After doing what seemed like several loops of the airport, the GPS was turned off and I used a paper map to navigate us to the car rental dealership. Here we dropped off Alice and made our way to the airport. The first hurdle was when we were told that we were only allowed three pieces of baggage (we had four) despite encountering no problems on the journey over. Try as we might, the simplest solution was to pay the 100 euros and be done with it. We then passed through security, which seemed to be much stricter than usual. We found a reasonable place to sit by 7pm, with power points, where we sat catching up with our respective diaries and having something to eat before it was time to make our way to the departure gate at 11:30pm. During the trip to Singapore, we lost seven hours, meaning we arrived at 6pm. We slept most of the way and the meal was ok. We only had a couple of hours at Changi, Philip went off to have a shower and Patsy and I went to find a geocache at the butterfly garden. It became apparent that the cache was not there so we replaced it and logged the find. The flight back to Melbourne was on an Airbus A380, the sort we had seen being manufactured in Toulouse. It was nice and new and shiny, the most noticeable difference being the reduction in the engine noise compared with other planes. It is much easier to hold a conversation, as one voice does not have to be raised for the other to hear. However the Qantas staff still seemed to be getting used to serving the vast number of people on these planes. By the time we had dinner there was not much time for sleeping. It also took quite some time to exit the plane, as there seemed to be only one exit. We landed in Melbourne at 5:50am, collected our baggage and checked it in for the domestic flight back to Adelaide. We were seated for departure by 7am and the trip back to Adelaide was very quick, with good views of the Coorong along the way. From the airport Margaret picked us up and took us back to Patsy and Philip’s where I met back up with Jo.

The end, hope you enjoyed it! Stay tuned for the accompanying pictures!!