London twice in one year!

A little bit of background

The subtitle of this post could be "part 2" as it documents my second trip to London in 2022 as part of the job I was in at the time as the Global Education Manager for an international travel assistance company. When I mean by travel assistance is helping travellers with insurance policies in emergency situations when they call the number in their policy for help. The organisation I worked for was owned by a large insurance firm and it provided travel assistance to a number of other insurers and organisations.

Part 2's stint of working in the London office was longer than part 1 - six weeks instead of four - as I was stepping in to train a new group of logistical and medical case managers in the absence of a trainer in the London team. I'll explain all that later in the post.

This post is the third in a series of a four on my travel experiences in my global training manager role in 2022 and 2023. The next one in the series documents my third and final trip to London in 2023. There are two other posts of my 2022 travels: London and Toronto.

My first trip to London that year was during a lovely time to be in the city (April-May) and the weather was fairly kind to me. The second time around for that year, not so much. I arrived on the first weekend in November and headed home just before Christmas, the latest time in the year I'd ever been to London. This is the weather that greeted me. Still, those purple seats on the Elizabeth line were like an old friend to me and it was kind of nice to be back. It was also a bit surreal, feeling so at home and on familiar territory in a place on the other side of the world.

Back on the familiar Elizabeth line!

I'd flown in from Milan on Friday, 4 November. Why Milan? I'd been on holidays with my then 21-year-old daughter, E, as we were celebrating our respective milestone birthdays that came and went during the pandemic with a three-week trip to Amsterdam, Paris, Nice and Milan. (Post to come.) Not part of my original plans, but it turned out that a second group of trainees need to be run through the induction program. I'd sent my Australian Trainer over to run the program with the first group, but she was needed back in Brisbane to train new staff there.

The training was actually arranged around my personal plans, as I'd had the leave approved and the holidays booked for months before the training came up in London. The organisation was in a huge state of flux, coping with the post-pandemic return to travel and resultant uplift of staff. They were expanding at the same time and change was constant. Those were heady days for the business and the staff in leadership and management roles.

The personal and work travel meant I was away from home for over nine weeks. It was a long time to be away while also dealing with some health issues and a stressful job. More on that later...

This was my eighth trip to London! My reflections on what the trip meant to me can be found at the end of this post. You can also check out my posts on my previous London wanderings in 1996, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018. Here's the link again to London 2022 part 1, my seventh trip to the city.

My homes in London for six weeks

I'd sent a bag with work clothes to London some weeks earlier, collected and taken care of by one of my London colleagues. The suitcase in the above photo was the the one I used while on holidays with E, so I didn't have to cart work clothes around Europe.

I rebooked the Staycity Aparthotel in Hayes as I'd been happy enough there earlier in the year. My Australian Trainer stayed in the hotel when she was in London to facilitate the first training group, just before I arrived. She'd had a pretty awful experience at the hotel - nothing like mine - and it turned out the place was going to close for renovations. I'd not been advised of that when I booked my six-week stay. I forged ahead with my booking and stayed there for two of the six weeks before moving to another hotel. (Looking it up recently, the hotel still looks to be closed, so I have no idea what went on. There seemed to be issues with the building when my Australian Trainer stayed there.)

Here's a reminder of the hotel. It sits adjacent to the Hayes and Harlington Tube station, now a major stop on the new Elizabeth line out to Heathrow. Buses stop at the Tube station as well, and there's a mini Tesco next door and an Asda a few minutes' walk away.

Here's a reminder, too, of where I was working in London in Uxbridge, west of the city centre. Not really London - zone 6 in public transport terms and almost 30km from the centre of the city. Uxbridge is in the far left corner of the below map to give some perspective. It's an hour's journey by car and around 85 minutes on the Tube to central London (indicated by Trafalgar Square on the below map).

My stay for all of my first trip to London in 2022, but only for the first two weeks of my second trip.

After two weeks at the Staycity I moved to the Staybridge Suites near Heathrow. I took these photos on the day I moved, including the meal I ordered from room service. (Nice food but an exorbitant price for what it was!) I was kind of sad to leave Staycity as I'd quite liked it there. Despite the Tube line not going out to Uxbridge, it was convenient to be staying adjacent to the Hayes and Harlington station for weekends (and only a 15-minute train ride into Paddington Station) with a supermarket next door. The bus took about 40 minutes and an Uber only about 15 minutes.

The hotel was definitely a step up from the Staycity Aparthotel but it was further away from the office in Uxbridge and the bus journeys I took seemed long in the cold and dark winter mornings and afternoons. That said, it was my choice to request a hotel with cooking facilities, a laundry and a gym. The Premier Inn in Uxbridge itself is where visiting staff usually stay but I preferred to have an apartment-style place to call home for the big blocks of time I was working there.

I took the below photo from the front of the hotel. I was attempting to show the hotel's location right across on busy Bath Road that lines Heathrow Airport. The cars and buildings in the photo are part of the workings of the airport. Terminal 2 is a five-minute drive heading left from the hotel.

This map gives a better sense of the hotel's location near Heathrow. It was an easy short bus ride to Terminal 2 to take the Piccadilly or Elizabeth line into the city on weekends but it was a journey of close to 90 minutes each way all up.

There are more photos of the Staybridge hotel in the post on my 2023 trip but I've added them here, too. I'm not sure why I didn't take photos of the hotel once I got there. Generally, I didn't take as many photos as the other two trips. I think that was partly due to the winter weather and the fact that I was dealing with quite a bit of stuff at the time.

The collage says "back" at Staybridge as these photos are in the post of my third and final trip to London in my global role.. All photos taken from the hotel website.

These photos were taken from Google maps, showing the convenient bus stops either side of the hotel for getting to the office and into central London. I could take a bus 5 minutes down the road to the Heathrow bus station and take the Piccadilly or Elizabeth line into London. The bus went in the other direction to Uxbridge, a long and winding almost 60-minute trip around the back end of Heathrow and through Hillingdon.

Circle insert: The dodgy bus stop in Uxbridge outside the Tesco supermarket to get back to my hotel.

The work bits

The post on the other 2022 trip to London in this work series of four documents my first trip earlier in the year when the new London command centre was being set up. I had been in my role as Global Education Manager for just under a year at the time of that first trip. The world was in the throes of the pandemic when I started in the newly-created role in May 2021. I was brought on board to uplift induction training for logistical and medical case managers before travel resumed and the company would have to grow their staff numbers back to pre-pandemic levels. I thought I had plenty of time to prepare and to develop a new program, but things escalated quickly after international travel unexpectedly resumed. There were also major changes to processes after a new case management system was introduced in December 2021.

I had a Trainer in Toronto for new Canadian staff and that operation was run differently using a different case management system. There was no one but me to support the OG logistical and medical case managers in London through their first weeks and the command centre wasn't established at that point. Things would have gone smoother, I think, if the operation was set up before the first staff were hired. Anyway, you can read more about that experience in my London 2022 part 1 post.

The trip I made to London earlier in the year for the OG training.

London 2022 part 2 was a different experience. I had an Australian Trainer to facilitate the induction training in Brisbane by the time I returned from the first London trip and she had been in London before I arrived to train the first official group of case managers. I had hired a Trainer for the London office remotely and he was to learn the ropes from my Australian Trainer during the facilitation of Group 1's training. I was initially going to be in London to support him with Group 2's training (starting straight after the completion of the Group 1 program). Unfortunately, things didn't work out as planned, so I was left to run the program on my own. I was extremely anxious about this task as I was the manager of training, not a facilitator. Losing the London Trainer after only two weeks was also a big blow. I feel exhausted just thinking about all that happened when I look back on it now!

My Australian Trainer and our London colleague. Working for a company during a time of immense growth and change is not for the faint of heart. Their faces say it all!

Still, I was back in the familiar London office on the Monday after I arrived, working with colleagues I had established relationships with when I came over earlier in the year. The technical issues I'd experienced for the OG training were largely ironed out and Group 1 was operational - thanks to my Australian Trainer - and assisting customers with their emergency travel needs. Despite the challenges of working in the global role at a time of such chaos, I really do treasure my experiences in London. I loved the office atmosphere in London and the staff, and I have many fond memories of the time I spent there.

I celebrated my 52nd birthday while I was in London for the second time that year. My colleagues took me out to dinner to the pub near the office and we had cake on the day of my birthday. The below shot on the top right shows my training group. I received a lovely gift of chocolates and a much-needed warm scarf from them. My Australian Trainer sent me a beautiful bunch of flowers as well (bottom left shot). I felt quite emotional that day, being so far away from home on my birthday in a stressful situation, yet rather touched by the gesture from the training group.

Sidebar: British chocolate tastes so much creamier than Australian!

I also had the opportunity to experience pre-Christmas celebrations with the London team while I was there. Here we are at the Christmas party at Nonna Rosa, the pub in Uxbridge High Street that the team frequented (top left and bottom right). The top right photo was taken on Christmas Jumper Day, an annual fundraiser for Save the Children. I'm wearing a jumper supplied by the wife of my colleague, DMcD, pictured in the bottom right photo and standing three to the left of me in the Christmas jumper shot. The Christmas donuts in the bottom left photo were supplied by Lexxika, the company we used for translating medical documentation.

The six weeks of training certainly were eventful. Two logistical case manager trainees quit at the end of the first week after some unpleasantness surrounding a miscommunication and a misalignment of their expectations of the job and the realities. I put a huge amount of pressure on myself to run the training to a high standard and it left me worn out. As with all four stints of working in the offices outside of Australia, I was juggling the training with the demands of my actual job, and across multiple time zones. The lack of defined processes and the disconnect between training and floor practice made the training challenging. I'd also taken on the role of managing enhancements to the new case management system and this made my job overwhelmingly full. There's a lot I would do differently with the benefit of hindsight and experience.

On the upside, I learnt a lot about the practical side of the job. I feel like this made me a better manager of the global training team, knowing the job at the rubber-hits-the-road level. Despite setting high (and probably unrealistic) expectations of myself as the fill-in Trainer, I reckon I did a pretty good job of it in the end. I also managed to work my way through the interview process to hire a new London Trainer, conducting the final interview in person just before I flew back to Australia. Honestly, I think I could cope with just about anything that is thrown my way now because of my experiences in that global role.

My first weekend in London

I didn't venture out much over my first weekend in London. I was still adjusting to being back and trying to prepare myself for the training (and the realisation that I was solely responsible for the new group of trainees). I spent most of the weekend preparing for the training and stocking up on groceries. At one point I took the Tube to Paddington just to buy sushi for lunch. I have actually ZERO photos of those first two days, mostly because I was letting my anxieties over running the training take hold...

My second weekend in London: Saturday wanderings and Sunday lunch with a friend

The weather wasn't too bad on the second weekend - cold but sunny at least. I managed to have a nice wander around central London on Saturday, checking out the pre-Christmas decorations in Oxford Street and generally enjoying my personal time after surviving week 1 of training. It was easy to get into London from Hayes, taking the new Elizabeth line into Paddington and walking from there.

I'd regretted not buying a Miffy soft toy in the Miffy shop in Amsterdam with E, so I made it my mission to find one in London. I succeeded, after much searching in the toy department in Selfridges.

Miffy mission accomplished!

On Sunday I met my friend, HB, in Leicester Square for lunch. The one positive thing about the three trips I made to London while in the global role was the opportunity to reconnect with London friends. HB and I had met at a conference in Helsinki in 2013 and I'd spent time with her twice during my first stint in London earlier in the year.

I had a lovely stroll from Tottenham Court Road Station to Leicester Square on the way to meet HB. I took the Elizabeth line from Paddington to the fancy new station at Tottenham Court Road. I love the pretty buildings and greenery in London and it sure is nice on a good day.

We wandered around Leicester Square for a bit before finding a pizza place for lunch. Here we are at the Paddington Statue. The main statue is, understandably, in Paddington Station but you can also find the marmalade-eating bear in Leicester Square, along with a bunch of other statues, installed from 2020, including Bugs Bunny, Mary Poppins, Wonder Woman and Harry Potter.

My third weekend in London: Hotel switch and Tate Modern meet-up

Saturday of my third weekend was spent moving from the Staycity Aparthotel in Hayes to the Staybridge Suites near Heathrow. The weather was bleak and foggy and I was really just filling in time until my room was ready at the new hotel. I packed everything up in the morning, including leftover groceries, and left my bags at the hotel reception at the Staycity. I took the Tube a few stops to Ealing Broadway and wandered around the shopping centre there. That's it in the middle photo below. Lots of Christmassy things happening, but the stores at the centre weren't all that great. I remember that I had sushi for lunch and took the Tube back to Hayes, then a taxi over to my new digs.

On Sunday I met m friend, MM, at the Tate Modern. This was my first experience of getting myself around London from my new home at the Staybridge Suites. I took the bus to Heathrow Terminal 2 from the hotel, then the Elizabeth line then the Jubilee line to Southwark. I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to navigate London's transport system by then! It was kind of cool to feel like a Londoner, actually, even if only for a few weeks at a time.

Scenes from my journey to meet MM, including lunch at Costa near the Southwark Tube.

I'm not much of a modern art fan but MM and I had a wander around while we caught up. We'd first met at a conference in Manchester in 2011 and had spent time together at subsequent conferences, including two stays at her place in Brighton. I'd missed seeing MM when I was in London in 2015 and earlier in 2022, so our meet-up at the Tate was a fabulous chance to reconnect. I had a delicious brownie for afternoon tea in the museum's café and we had a lovely catch up.

We were treated to a magnificent winter sunset as we made plans to part ways and head back to our respective places. Just look at these beautiful shots! The view towards the Millennium Bridge from the south bank of the Thames was stunning on a grey winter's afternoon, as was the perspective of the sun setting behind the modern buildings that frame the Tate Modern.

I walked the 2km across Blackfriars Bridge to the posh new Farringdon Station to take the Elizabeth line back to Heathrow. This gave me the chance to see the magnificent St Paul's Cathedral as the sun was setting.

Along the way I passed by the Black Friar on Queen Victoria Street and took these shots. The hotel sits just off the edge of Blackfriars Bridge on the northern bank of the Thames. It is a Grade II listed art-nouveau structure built in 1875, and then remodelled in 1905, on the site of a former Dominican friary (1279-1539).

I remember finding a small M&S supermarket near St Paul's that I stopped off at to buy dinner supplies before making my way to Farringdon Station to take the Elizabeth line back to Heathrow. I came out of the supermarket and walked to the station in the dark, but upon looking at my phone, I saw that it was only 5pm. It felt like midnight! It was so strange to me, to find the days short and dark. This was a completely new experience, as even in the dead of winter where I live in Australia, it is much brighter than I found London to be.

My fourth weekend in London: Birthday celebrations

My fourth weekend in wintery London was all about celebrating my 52nd birthday that had come and gone during the week. I spent Saturday with my Australian friend, AC, whom I'd met at university in Australia some thirty years earlier. A longtime London resident with her Kiwi husband and London-born son, AC and I had reconnected a few years earlier after a break in our friendship. I'd met up with her at her home in Walthamstow in east London during my trip earlier in the year and I was thrilled to have the chance to spend the day with her for my birthday.

We met up in South Kensington in the morning. I took the Piccadilly line from Heathrow T2 directly there. I love this part of London, with its pretty mews and plethora of museums. I got to pick our main activity, and I chose a photographic exhibition that was being held in a small gallery in Old Brompton Road.

The Seeing Auschwitz exhibition was one of the most moving and memorable museum experiences I've ever had. The exhibition incorporates 100 photos, sketches and testimonies of the Polish concentration camp and of the Holocaust. The experience asks visitors to consider what it means to share the gaze of the perpetrator, the victim, the onlooker, and what that means for us as in the present. I thought the exhibition was beautifully curated and it was a privilege to have had the opportunity to experience it. It may sound an odd thing to do on one's birthday, but for a history nerd like me, it was perfect!

Seeing the smiles on the faces of the camp staff was one of the most harrowing images of the exhibition.

Writing this post in 2025, the exhibition has taken on new meaning for me. I have spent many years reading about the Holocaust and the atrocities committed against the Jewish people of Europe and others considered undesirable by the Nazi regime. What I have trouble reconciling now is that those same atrocities are being carried out on the Palestinian people by the survivors and descendants of those horrors. As I read somewhere recently, what we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

On a lighter note, AC and I had a lovely lunch in a gorgeous South Kensington café before wandering around central London. Here we are in St James's Park later that day. The food shots are lunch (bottom left) and dinner (top right). The necklace in the bottom right shot is my birthday gift from AC. It's a beautifully simple yet thoughtful symbol of me (the triangle) and the my husband and two children (the circles).

It was a freezing winter's afternoon but I enjoyed our wanderings. There is something about winter in London that is rather stunning, even if the weather is awful.

After we'd warmed up with a coffee and chai latte respectively later in the afternoon, I was treated to a bucket list experience: Christmas lights in London. So pretty! That said, being a Saturday night a month out from Christmas, it was completely mad in the central city that evening. People everywhere! We tried to get the Tube to our evening destination but it was closed due to crowding, so we ended up taking a bus then a cab to get there on time.

After a rushed pasta dinner in a cafe close by, we made it to Hampstead Theatre in time for the evening performance of Mary. The play ran at the theatre from 21 October to 26 November and we went to the final performance of its season. Written by Rona Munro and directed by Roxana Silber, Mary is described thus on the theatre's website:

It’s 1567. Meet James Melville, an intelligent, charismatic and skilled diplomat who is also one of the most loyal servants of Mary Stuart, the troubled Queen of Scots.  It’s a time of political turmoil and the shocking crimes he has witnessed have shaken him. Now he needs to decide who’s guilty, who’s innocent, and who is too dangerous to accuse. Change is coming, but at what price?

We had front row seats for the play and I found it spellbinding. This was my first experience of a play in London in a small theatre and I loved being so close to the stage and the feeling of immersion in the story that it generated. It was also a thrill to see Brian Vernel from The last kingdom in the play. Of course, the highlight was Douglas Henshall, AKA Jimmy Perez from one of my favourite shows, Shetland. I was randomly standing in the foyer after the performance waiting for AC to use the loo when Douglas Henshall walked by. A fan stopped to speak to him, so I did, too. What a cool experience! He was lovely to talk to and laughed when I told him I was from Australia. He said, "I hope you haven't come all that way just to see me.".

Fangirl moment with Jimmy Perez from Shetland.

On Sunday I met my friend, AD, at Canary Wharf. The new Elizabeth line had been extended by then and I could take it right through to Canary Wharf from Heathrow T2. AD came down on the train from Rochester to meet me there. We'd caught up twice during my visit earlier in the year and previous to that, during our 25th wedding anniversary trip in 2018. We actually met online but had seen each other a few times in person in London. Here we are by the Christmas tree at the shopping centre at Canary Wharf:

We spent our day together at the Executions exhibition at the London Museum at Docklands. The exhibition ran from October 2022 to April 2023. Executions were carried out across London from as early as the 12th century, right through to the 19th. There are still some vestiges of execution practices seen in London today. I thought the subject matter was sensibly handled in the exhibition and I found it fascinating. The vest worn by Charles I at his execution was on display, as was a recreation of the Tyburn gallows.

I bought this print in the Museum gift shop. I absolutely love old prints in the etching style. This one is the view of London Bridge in 1616, from an engraving by John Vischer.

My fifth weekend in London: A trip to Paris!

I took the opportunity of being in London to catch up with an old friend in Paris. It seems so strange to say that I popped over for the day, but that's what I did! There's no popping anywhere in the big, brown land where I live...

I managed to find a last-minute cheap British Airways flight from Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle Airport, arriving in Paris at 9.30am. It was an early start for me but still doable from my hotel so close to the airport. The sparkly Christmas tree in the shot below was taken at the departures hall at Heathrow.

Once I was in Paris, I bought a return Metro ticket for €10 and made my way to my friend's apartment. It took about an hour to get there from the airport, from the north eastern side of the city to the 7th Arrondissement. I was practised at using the Paris Metro from just a few weeks' earlier, when E and I bravely made our way around the city. I had to change lines, so I was super proud of myself for getting there on my own.

This is where my friend, RMcC, lives. She is retired now, but we met in 2009 when I started a new role in teaching and learning in the Business School at Queensland University of Technology. RMcC was my manager and we became friends, a relationship forged largely from our joint writing project to produce an academic skills text for commencing students in the School that was later published by Pearson Australia. I left the role in 2014 and went to work in another university in Brisbane. We lost touch for a few years, reconnected, but by then RMcC moved to France. This was my first in-person connection for some eight years!

RMcC rents an apartment indicated by the encircled red pin. Lucky her!

In all honesty, RMcC is living my dream retirement. She has a stone cottage in a little hamlet in the South of France, near Limoges, and rents an apartment in Paris. She moves between both places at her leisure. What a wonderful life!

We'd tried to arrange something for my previous visit to London earlier in the year, but it didn't work out, unfortunately, so I was thrilled to be heading to Paris to meet up. The weather was a bit rubbish, but I loved being back in the city again. I feel so at home anywhere in Europe. At the risk of sounding naff, it speaks to me in ways that no other part of the world does.

The below shots show the view from RMcC's apartment, the street nearby where we wandered later for lunch, and the 7th Arrondissement that surrounds her apartment.

RMcC was my mentor and I owe so much of my knowledge of adult learning and learning design to her. We had so much to catch up on, I wish now I'd stayed overnight. The apartment is a one-bedroomed place so I would have to have found somewhere to stay and frankly, running the training and managing my job had worn me out.

Here we are at lunch. How French! And I just love the photo of the two of us that one of the waiters took.

Zoe, on her little bed in the apartment, is included in this collage.

It was a little stressful getting back to the airport, not because of managing the Metro or worrying about getting lost, but because the trains were crowded and I was anxious about making the flight back in the evening. It turned out to be a long journey back to London as there was only one person at the check-in area for a bazillion passengers and it took AGES to get through. My anxiety about missing the flight was ramped up to the maximum even though another passenger waiting in line told me the flights were being held. I was had it by the time I got back to my hotel but it was completely worth the chance to spend the day in Paris with a dear friend.

I really needed a day of downtime and even though I wished I'd had more time with my friend, it was nice to sleep in and potter around the hotel on Sunday. The weather was awful so I didn't feel like going anywhere much anyway. Sometimes I had to force myself to leave the hotel to make the most of the time in London as I was so exhausted from work. Travelling for work is not anywhere near as glamorous as it sounds, evidenced by my Sunday outing on the bus to the Yiewsley Aldi to stock up for the week...

My final weekend in London: Snow!

My sixth and final weekend in London was HUGE, mostly because it snowed and I was able to see snow falling for the first time in my life. I'd experienced fallen snow and a white Christmas on our 2016 trip to Chicago, but this was something different altogether. It had been cold and frosty for weeks, but I was excited at the prospect of snow.

Saturday began in extreme cold with snow predicted. I went for one final walk through central London as I only had a week to go before heading home. Despite the cold, it was a beautiful day.

I ended up in Regent's Park. I loved wandering around the frosty green space, feeling invigorated in the cold and marvelling at how walking where I live - in constant humidity - is such a different experience. Look at the beautiful photos I took that day!

There were plenty of indications that snow was coming. The air was super still and there was frost all over the ground. I look cold in the below photo, but the image still doesn't capture just how cold I truly felt.

I walked on up to Primrose Hill later, before heading into Chalk Farm to take the Tube back to my hotel, a journey on three different Tube lines and then a bus from Heathrow Terminal 2. I took this stunning photo at Primrose Hill looking back towards London.

It was just as cold on Sunday when I headed out to Walthamstow in East London to spend my last day of free time with my friend, AC. I'd realised by then that the Elizabeth line was a lot more expensive than the Piccadilly (although faster and nicer trains) so I took the Piccadilly line from Heathrow T2 to Green Park then the Victoria line to Walthamstow. Such a long journey! Anyway, we enjoyed a lovely soup lunch and our final catch up by the warmth of the fire in AC's front room.

I spotted these icy spiderwebs walking to AC's house from the Tube station. I'd never seen anything like them before. How incredible!

I decided to head back to my hotel in the early evening as I had one last week of training to get through before flying back to Australia and I was feeling ready to go home. It had been a long couple of months. This is the second regret I have from this trip as it snowed heavily not long AFTER I left. I couldn't believe it. I missed all this!

Snow did fall eventually out in the west of the city. I spent my evening running in and out of the hotel waiting for it to happen. It finally did - at around 9.30pm - although not as heavily as in other parts of the city. Still, I was able to stand out in the hotel carpark and feel the snow falling onto my coat. Awesome!

This was the scene I woke up to the next morning. There was a beautiful dusting of icing sugar everywhere. So pretty!

Here are some shots of snow experiences from some of my colleagues and trainees. The middle photo was taken by the partner of one of my nurse trainees, also an Australian. Yep, we kind of get excited about snow!

The following day, AC and her family woke up to this Walthamstow winter wonderland. I still can't believe that I missed it!

Homeward bound

After over nine weeks away from home, I was completely ready to finish up. It had been a unique experience for me in London this time, from both the training perspective and for the chance to see falling snow. The weather at times had been harsh, but I also have fond memories of the stunning winter sun.

My final week kind of petered out and I left with little fanfare. It was all rather anti-climactic and looking back now, the signs were there that it was the beginning of the end for me in the role. At least I got to hang out with the OG case manager (below photo) and the OG team leader (my Christmas jumper-loaning colleague) and I am still in touch with both to this day.

In my final week I also took the Tube to Baker Street one evening after work to reconnect with AT, one of the Sales team members I'd met during my first trip over earlier in the year. The two circular photos were taken when we first met, before AT left to work for a different organisation. We've stayed in touch and reconnected for dinner at the Rayyan in Marylebone. Great company and delicious Arabic food!

My long journey home

When it looked as if I was going to be needed in London, I changed my original flight itinerary for my personal trip with E to Europe. This meant I missed my final chance to fly business class (for the company policy changed the following year) as I switched my personal return flight from Milan to Brisbane from the original date in November to one six weeks later. The company paid the flight change fee and the return flight from Milan to London. I made a silly decision to keep the return from Milan as I had to go back there to get home. I should have flown out of London. I think I thought I was saving the company money and hassle but it didn't turn out that way. Regret number 3 of the trip!

My journey home was long as I flew to Milan on Friday evening of 16 December. The flight was changed to a later time at last minute. I think I am recalling correctly when I also say that the destination airport was changed to Milan Linarte on the opposite side of the city to Milan Malpensa Airport where my hotel was booked and where I was scheduled to fly out from on Sunday morning. I arrived very late in the evening and then took an (expensive) Uber to Malpensa, 65km across the city. Gawd!

I did have a day to gather my thoughts before flying out and, as the below photos show, the weather was superb in Milan. Malpensa is literally in the middle of nowhere, though, and I didn't have anything left in the tank to take the train into central Milan. In the end, I was just cranky with myself for not thinking my plans through properly. Even if the flight change from Milan to London for my return was more expensive than sticking with Milan, it would have saved time and the cost of the hotel in Milan and the Uber across the city between the two airports. Lesson learnt!

From incredible cold to searing heat: Back in Australia for Christmas and the middle of another blistering summer. Needless to say, my birthday scarf has not come out of the cupboard since I have been back in Queensland! It was a lifesaver during my stay in London, though, as you can see from the below shots.

Here are my reflections on what my eighth trip to London meant to me.