Windy

We are very sad to be leaving Shanklin today. This has been a fantastic experiment. I think we were both a bit nervous about the idea when it started because, although we’ve both been working from home very successfully for a year and a half, this was much further away if we had ever needed to go into an office. But we succeeded, and I don’t think anybody really noticed, which was the main aim of the test. Unfortunately, all these things need to come to an end.

So, we packed the final things and cleaned the Airbnb as much as we needed to and were downstairs waiting for our taxi at 9am. We’d given ourselves a good 40 minutes to get to the catamaran in Ryde, and in the end it was running a little late, so had a lot of time to kill with our bags at the terminal. We talked to the taxi driver about the last month as he had only been living on the island for a few years. He said that he had never been at a point where he had been stranded and was unable to get to the mainland, because there was always something running. That was quite reassuring and his spirit made us think about doing this whole thing again next year. 

After such wonderful weather over the past few weeks perhaps it was good that the crossing was a bit choppy and it was raining as we left. I think we were both quite sad to see the pier disappear in the distance as we headed towards Portsmouth. When ended up on the 10:45 train going home via Waterloo. We chose this route because of involved the fewest changes with all of our bags.

We were home about half past one and did a little bit of unpacking. PY got some washing on straightaway.  By about 3:30pm, we’d decided we wanted to do a little bit of shopping and instead of going to the nearest supermarket we took a walk into New Malden to the Lidl as we had had such a great experience with the shop on The Island. With loaded up for a few days which is all we really needed.