Long Way Home

Set off at three in the afternoon for Manchester Airport to collect the elder daughter on her return from Mongolia, and having allowed for traffic hold-ups there of course were none and I arrived nice and early, racking up additional parking costs (the £4.80 an hour presumably reflects the privileged view of incoming planes from the top deck of the multi-storey); the connecting flight from Paris was only 20 minutes late (during the wait I met a young man holding some cardboard with my daughter’s name on, but that’s another story that would take more than even one of my sentences to relate) so we were back on the road by eight o’clock only to be persuaded by my ditzy satnav to abandon the direct route back and follow her scenic, admittedly traffic-free, long way home via the Woodhead Pass and Barnsley, the extra half hour taking my daughter’s total journey time past the 24 hour mark - definitely a long way home from Ulaan Baatar.