Packing the car, Flying and meeting D

We had fifteen suitcases packed and ready to go in the car. Were they all going to fit ?! No they weren't !

Right at the last minute my mum had to unpack some cases in the garden and re arrange the car. How we drove all the way to London the way we did I will never know. Dad was the only one who had space to breath at all ! Mum had a suitcase on her lap, I had a tiny space to squeeze into with suitcases piled up beside me.

We made it to the air port safely and then had to do 5 trips back and forth to the car with trollies to get all our bags to check in. We had a fantastic man who checked us in. All our bags were overweight but he didn't bat an eyelid.  Our flight was delayed two hours so we sat around waiting for ages until we were finally allowed to fly. I love flying and was so excited to get back to Istanbul, this city I love, and start helping improve peoples life's.

I had just come out of hospital where I had been complaining of heart problems. The cardiologist said I was completely fine and I was allowed to fly. Little did he know...

The flight was going fine until about two hours in. I suddenly couldn't breath and had a lot of pain in my chest. I ended up on emergency oxygen for the rest of the flight, it was no fun at all. The best part was that when we arrived in Istanbul we had wheelchair assistance so I didn't have to walk the long corridors all around the airport. Bonus :) We had a porter to get all of our bags for us. When he asked us how many bags we had in Turkish, we replied 15. He thought we had got confused with our numbers, but he soon found out we definitely did have 15 very heavy suitcases which he would stack up on a trolley for us !  Luckily we went through customs with no problems because the porter was pushing the trolley, im sure if we were pushing it we would have been stopped and asked to un pack every bag.

D met us on the other side and we loaded up the big van and all squeezed into the front and headed towards the hotel. We checked in and stuffed our room from floor to ceiling with all the suitcases before heading out to get some roast chicken dinner.


It was nearly 3 am by the time we got into bed and I wasn't too impressed with the yappy dog that kept me from sleeping !

This picture below shows what our hotel room looked like for the majority of the trip