We are on the road again!

Today we drove our little car from Usk in Wales to Manchester the home of a football team whose name I cannot remember! We drove through Glouster and saw flood waters all around us. Boy has it rained! Can you imagine after 10 years of drought in Australia we have had rain continually. Val remands me that it has rained daily for all but two of the last 30 days where we have been! There's no need to have short showers here right now.

Tomorrow we make our way to a place just north of York where we will visit with the family if Naomi, a lovely lass who dropped into Aus earlier this year and stayed with us for s day or two.

On Monday we are scheduled to fly from Manchester to Helsinki in Finland. Our plans and flights have changed a bit. While we have been on the track we had contact with a brother we have known for more than 20 years who is a Lutheran Pastor in Finland. We had a strong sense it was important to go and have some time with this friend. We then fly to Geneva and a week with a brother there who translated "So you don't want to go Church anymore" into French. From there we will fly home via Chennai. I was talking to Kevin Kamalraj In India today and they are looking forward to welcoming us. There are only two problems.

First, When Val lost her passport we thoguht we'd need to get a new visa for her. When the old passport was returned with the new one it seemed that her old passport would be able to be used for her visa into India. We have emailed the Indian Consulate in London on two occasions and we have no response. We are not sure at all what will happen here.

Second, we changed our airline ticket and United Airlines assured us that the situation was in hand and all we have to do is get Scandanavian Airlines to rewrite the ticket. We thought it important enough to stay here in Manchester overnightand try to get the thing sorted (as the English seem to say). We went to the airport and found the SAS office but they did not have the data from UA. Afetr a phone call the data was delivered to them but there was no evidence that we had paid for the changes (we believe it was billed against our credit card). We'll know in a day or so if the thing is fixed and we can fly!