Travelling home...

Sadly, this will be my last blog for this trip. I'm at home now, sitting at my kitchen table writing this. The great Cambridge adventure has come to a close, and I am nearly over my jet lag.

The trip home was long, gruelling work. I checked out of St Catharine's at 10am on Sunday. Then I caught a coach down to Heathrow airport in London, arriving at about 3pm. I checked in myself and my bag at 6pn. My luggage limit for the trip home was 30kgs: my huge suitcase came in at 29.7kg! Lucky...
I then waited around in the airport until 10pm, when my flight left to Singapore. That flight was just over twelve hours. I got to Singapore 6pm local time (about 10am my time), and waited around in the airport for nearly seven hours until my flight to Perth left at 1am. Purgatory is being stuck in an airport with no cafes when you're jet lagged out of your brain and really want a cup of tea.
Eventually I boarded to go to Perth, that flight was just over four hours, and I arrived in Perth 6:30am local time - Tuesday. At the end of my journey I worked out that I'd been on the move for just over thirty-seven hours. It's now Friday and I'm almost back to normal!

Here's some photos from the trip home:

Heathrow airport Departure lounge... It was a little scary: lots of people!

The departures board at Heathrow

A giant teddy bear for charity auction outside Harrods

9pm at Changi airport, Singapore

Burger King at Changi airport

Photos from punting

I went punting on Wednesday afternoon, and it was a very relaxing experience :) Here are so photos I took from the ride - a punt's-eye view of the buildings along the Backs of Cambridge.

Setting off from Scudamore's Punting Shack.. (It's not really called that... well it is called Scudamore's)

The rather attractive legs of our very own punter.

Other punters

Heading upriver - the current was really strong because of all the rain we've had.

Both ends of the Mathematical bridge 

The whole Mathematical Bridge.

:-D

A punt's-eye view of King's chapel

And King's college

School kids trying to punt by themselves... not a good idea, it made for much banging into each other.

The Jerwood Library, built to look like a ship setting sail into the two-metre deep canal.

Another punting company

A famous library built by a rich guy. All the books are kept on the second floor because sometimes the river floods and breaches the banks.

There were lots of these little doorways onto the river, they were the back service doors where market-punts sold their produce to the big houses

A typical English green house

The first bridge put across the river Cam, the first version of it was put there by farmers and townspeople in 760 AD to be able to buy and sell produce to the rest of East Anglia.

Pigeon-holes! Nests for the messenger-pigeons of professors before they invented the internet, where a pigeon would return with a message and it could be taken from them on the other side of the nesting box, hence the term 'pigeon-hole'!

Cambridge's answer to Venice's Bridge of Sighs. The Venetian Bridge of Sighs was built between the jail and the gallows, and people would be led from their cells to meet their doom, whereupon they sighed as they crossed the bridge. This bridge goes between one of the colleges and the place where students receive their exam results, hence the reference to sighing in the face of one's doom.

Ducklings :-)