We have finally left the villa, our home for the last ten years.

After three months of selling activity – cars, furniture, clothes, miscellaneous junk and the even the garden fence, we were ready to concede that everything remaining was useful and/or valuable enough to ship half way around the world. The packers took two days to parcel up all of our belongings and take to a storage warehouse ready to ship to New Zealand for us to receive in October.

The most bizarre item to somehow fall through the useful/valuable sieve was the Omani rock collection (see https://weatherislovely.com/2019/02/16/moving-a-mountain/). Nigel has always expressed a certain ambivalence to shipping rocks but Sue is determined to have a water feature with a reminder of our camping trips to the mountains of Oman. The packers dutifully parcelled them all up.

Nigel’s job during the packing process was to record the box numbers as they were loaded onto the truck. The packers called out the numbers as they walked out of the front door and Nigel crossed them off his list. As they struggled under the weight of Sue’s prize garden feature, Nigel told them that they should add the phrase ‘Bloody Women’ to the box number. So for several minutes a progression of men filed out of the villa calling out “137…Bloody Women”, “141…Bloody Women”, “173…Bloody Women”. It cheered everyone up immensely. Not sure what the guys who do the unpacking in New Zealand will be saying.

We are now in a studio apartment on Reem Island while we wait to find a way of getting to the UK. At this stage our outward flight, from Abu Dhabi to London, is cancelled but our return flight, back to Abu Dhabi, remains in place. Not too sure how that is meant to work!

Development had not even started on Reem Island when we arrived in Abu Dhabi 2009. Now several bridges connect it to Abu Dhabi island and there are numerous high rise buildings.

We are on the 17th floor of a 34 floor apartment block, surrounded by much taller buildings.

We do have access to the swimming pool that you see in the photo so Nigel is keeping up his swimming routine. We also have a pleasant walk along canal like beach front with mangroves on the opposite bank.

Life is certainly bearable but it would be nice to be getting on a plane!