"Where the bloody hell are you?!"
This was the somewhat surprising greeting I received from Mum when I phoned her from our new home. I could tell from her voice and her minor swear word, that she had been panicking in a big way.
My rather stunned response was "Well, our new home in Berlin, of course."
It was about 11pm on Monday night (11th April) when I phoned; 10pm in the UK.
I'll explain Mum's panic in a moment.
With almost no sleep for the entire trip, we were functioning on autopilot. We'd landed in Berlin airport and were stunned to discover how small it was. Our eight cases trundled off the baggage carousel and were piled at my feet.
The trolleys needed a 1 Euro coin to unchain them - welcome back to Europe. We had no coins. How the hell were we going to get them out of the hall?
Tim left us with the bags and wandered through the empty customs channel with one case to meet the "people who were going to drive us to the house". The airport was so tiny Tim was able to wander back and forth through the customs area and, with a borrowed coin, loaded up a trolley and off we went.
Our liaison officer was one of the two people collecting us, the other chap was driving. He'd got some shopping in for us - milk, sugar, bread, margarine (yuk) and cereals so we will be able to have breakfast tomorrow. Generously he also handed us a small bag of tea bags from his own kitchen. Good man!
Let me explain a little bit about how this type of move works. Because all our possessions are en route we are provided with some basic kit to tide us over. This is called a "float". We'd been living on float in Tokyo since the beginning of March and now we'll be doing the same here for a while. The float consists of basic requirements - bedding and kitchen equipment such as a kettle, toaster and a few pots and pans, crockery and cutlery. All of which has seen better days and is a bit yukky. But at least we can eat and drink until we can get to the shops.
We unloaded the cases from the car, were handed the keys and said goodnight to our saviours.
Finally we were in our new home. Exhausted beyond comprehension and more than a little stunned by it all. I tried to do timezone maths to ascertain how long our journey had taken but my brain melted. It was about 24 hours.
Our wonderful liaison man had made the beds up for us! What a lovely thought. I put Rhiannon to bed where she fell asleep instantly.
Then I made a cup of tea and phoned Mum.
The cause of her panic was soon explained.
Japan had suffered a powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake / aftershock which had temporarily closed Narita airport on the day we left (11th April). Mum hadn't been able to work out when the tremor occurred (timezone maths again) so didn't know if we'd taken off before it had struck - we had, obviously, as we had no idea about it. Mum doesn't have a computer so she had no way of checking and therefore was relying on others to update her. She was given the impression our plane was in Seoul.
To pile up the scare British Airways didn't update their arrivals website to say our flight had landed safely in Heathrow. So in virtual effect, our plane had completely disappeared from the skies.
With only this information to hand, no wonder she was panicking!
Too tired to explore the house, we turned up all the heaters as we were freezing and crashed into bed.
We've got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow (Tuesday 12th April).