The road home and leaving the white elephant

We set off from Nxai pan a little deflated knowing our time is nearly at an end, we drive to the South African border post only stopping at Francistown for a car wash, using the same one where the owner offered us football match tickets a few months ago. We decided to break our journey to Johannesburg and stay on the border on the Botswana side. We book a chalet for 2 nights and empty out the truck, we manage to sell a lot of our stuff to an Intrepid overland truck we have kept bumping into on our travels. All sorted after 1 day we leave on our last drive in the White Elephant to Johannesburg. I drop the family at the airport hotel along with all our possessions we would be flying back with and drive the car back to Bushlore where we bought it from just over 5 months ago, Bushlore where now going to sell it on our behalf to the next adventures. As I drove I started to reminisce and thought about all the wonderful experiences we had in this truck, I patted and stroked the dash as I drove and thanked the White Elephant for being such a great companion. I drop the keys off and head back to the hotel holding back the tears, I just can't believe it's come to an end.

We have one more day in Johannesburg and we decide just to stay in the hotel and chill, on our way back to the UK we are stopping off in Dubai for a few days, I still had some Hilton points left and it would mean Edwina would get to spend her birthday aboard. As in most international hotels the only English channels seem to be the news and around lunchtime we hear a plane has crashed, trying to land at Dubai airport and the airport has been closed. We follow events throughout the day and it seems our flight is unaffected. So the next day we take the shuttle bus loaded with our 7 pieces of checked in luggage and 5 carry-on bags to the airport. The queue to check-in is huge as the plane from last night is also leaving at roughly the same time. By the time we check-in there's no time to browse the duty free shops and have to go straight to the plane as its boarding, a great relief to me as the border official was coming to find us for one last African bribe, apparently we had overstayed and he had done us a favour and let us through, asking which gate we would be waiting at. We board the plane and taxi to the runway, we thunder down the runway and all look out of the windows to see the African ground going away not sure when we would return. Africans a magical continent and defiantly gets under your skin and has experiences that only here you can experience, so we know at some point we will be back.