Our journey home didn’t start too well, our shuttle to the airport didn’t show up, meaning we had to get a taxi to get to the airport in time to catch our flight. Liberia Airport was suitably chaotic, probably not helped by one of our airline’s flights being cancelled or everyone having to go to a separate queue to pay “departure tax” before they could even check in.

The chaos continued when we got on the plane, as not only was the air conditioning not working (with the outside temperature well over 30c) but the pilot couldn’t get the engines started, which wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring. In the end we took off over an hour late and got to Newark without any problems, we even got a good view of Lake Nicaragua.

In the end the flight was 40 minutes late into Newark, leaving us less than an hour before our flight to Heathrow took off, with us needing to clear US immigration, collect and recheck our bags, pass through security again and get to the furthest gate away from where we started. It was a bit tense, especially in the queue for immigration and we needed to run most the way after that, but we made it onto our flight just before they shut the doors.

Again, the flight was fine and passed quickly, we landed early and even got through passport control without having to queue, but after waiting ages for our bags it became apparent that they hadn’t made the transfer at Newark, which wasn’t too much of an issue as anything important was in our hand luggage. We were met at the airport by my parents and it was good to be driven in a nice executive saloon on smooth motorways after two weeks of minibuses on unpacked roads.

As I type, my first memory card is being imported into Lightroom, so expect a few more posts over the coming days/weeks.