It's been over a month since England rolled out the red carpet for us and welcomed us into the country in spectacular style. I'm not sure who told them but somehow they found out we were coming and not only did they send out an honour guard to escort us from the airport as pictured below, the king himself greeted us as we got off the plane and made our way to the carousel to collect our luggage. You can see him here greeting my wife Faith. He basically told us that he had an anonymous tip-off that we were coming and that he felt compelled to come down from the throne room and greet us himself. We were appreciative of the gesture however told him it was not necessary to come himself, and that he could have sent his second in command, a prince or someone like that, to do the greeting. After all, we figured he'd be busy doing something else, invading France or some such thing.
OK, so maybe this isn't the king, England doesn't have a king at all in fact, and to be completely honest no one rolled out the red carpet for us either. We slipped into Heathrow airport anonymously with no trumpet's heralding our arrival and no formal greeting of any sort. Despite our fairly low-key entry into England though I can assure you we had an amazing time and will be back to see more of the amazing United Kingdom. It's been an amazing trip however as good as England was, meeting my niece has been the best part of this trip!
Right now we're in Finland and once again the king came to visit us...OK, not really...My brother came to greet us at the airport which was nice considering I haven't seen him for 12 years. We have been hanging out and catching up on those years and I've had the chance to get to know his wife and little daughter. I've had a lot of messages asking to see pictures of us, his daughter and requests for me to regale the steemit community with stories about our reunion however to date I haven't really said much at all. There's no real reason for it I guess, lack of time to write an effective post and the fact we're trying to spend as much time together as possible has meant I have stayed rather silent about it however at some stage, probably when I return, I'll write more.
Today was quite special for me as I got to go swimming in a Finland lake. It's quite warm here at the moment (unusually warm) however the lake was COLD! I manned-up and got in though. It was special because I was frolicking around with my 2 year old niece, playing in the water, splashing and trying to catch fish by hand. (There actually were no fish, it's just a game she plays). We had a great time, in fact we went to the lake twice today so I got a double dose of my cute little niece. My brother @tarazkp took a load of pictures and he'll be sending them to me shortly; They'll be treasured images for me and I'll probably share one or two on steemit at some stage.
Tomorrow is a new day and we've got a couple of things planned however all I am really interested in is spending time with my brother and his family. We'll be down at the lake again so I'll have to find the courage to enter the frigid waters once again however having the chance to play with my niece is an opportunity too good to pass up. I'll be in there for as long as she wants to pretending to catch fish and shivering my ass off!
We leave Finland bound for home on Friday so I have four more full days to enjoy the company of my family and intend to make the most of each of them. For me, the only one of my family living in Adelaide back in Australia, I value the time I have with family as I know it will be a long time before I see them again.