I'm back. Back in Liverpool from Budapest, Innsbruck, Turin, Sauze d'Oulx, and Paris. I know, it all sounds romantic and lovely - having been skiing, skating, up mountains in cable cars and funiculars, down steps into smoky bars, through bustling markets, and across cities by rumbling trams.

But I have returned feeling rather like an old rubber dinghy - somewhat deflated. I should feel euphoric, yet I don't. The sheer richness of the past three weeks, the novelty, the different sights and sounds, are in stark contrast to the familiarity of home.

While travelling, there were surprises round every corner; here there are none. The road works that have destroyed Edge Lane are still there, the traffic still backed up. The taxi drivers still run red lights at the Parliament Street intersection, and the track work on the Wirral loop line means buses still replace trains. The weather is greyer and colder. The hot tap in the bathroom didn't get any better while I was away either.

I think what's made the biggest difference though, what's provided the starkest contrast, is the people. For three weeks I've been travelling with my daughter Catherine, who I hadn't seen since late 2015. It's been wonderful to have some quality time together, even if she did disappear up different mountains with her snowboard occasionally. Can't blame her. I think it was to escape me trying to get good shots of her on her snowboard with the video camera. I can be annoying sometimes.

And then of course there was Budapest, where we finished up, and met - for the first time in over thirty years - my half-brother and his family. My wife Liz flew in too, just in time for a few days in the Hungarian capital before our trip ended.

Suddenly, after there being just Catherine and me we were full-on family, being given guided tours, going out for a fantastic dinner to a nice cosy local restaurant, walking in the woods on a Sunday afternoon, and having lunch in my half-brother Endre's home. Catherine played chasing games with her half cousin and made a friend for life.

Not only were the opportunities for blogging fewer, there was so much to write about that I couldn't cope, so of course wrote nothing. Well, one brief blog that really doesn't do justice either to Budapest or to the enormity of reuniting with my half family. I needed to find life's pause button, but couldn't even find the remote.

I also learned such a lot about my father, and who he was. We were never close - he and my mother divorced when I was just four years old - but he visited my home city of Liverpool fairly often, usually when whichever ship he was skippering called into port, and once he took my mother and I on a two-week holiday to Hungary. That was the time he checked the light fittings for microphones.

But he was a different father to my half-brother Endre, and subsequently an enigmatic grandfather to Endre's children, Csaba and Edit. Near the banks of the Danube, Csaba showed us a memorial - a ship's anchor and some bollards, with a plaque - commemorating some Hungarian sailors who died in the war when the ship they were on hit a mine at the mouth of the Danube. Around thirty crew survived, my father being one of them. I had never known about it.

There's a lot of other family stuff I had never realised either, but learned about it thanks to Csaba's excellent English language skills. This is the third time I'd been to Budapest, but the first that I had been able to understand anything, and it's thanks to Csaba. Well, him, and the fall of communism; Budapest is a lot more westernised now than it was in 1984, or 1964 when I first visited.

But he was able to give me not only his perspective of my father, but also his father's perspective, and so some missing pieces of the family jigsaw are now in place. Some of them were pieces I didn't even know were missing.

On the last day and a half Liz and I explored Budapest while Catherine went off to see the statue park where the huge statues of the Communist era are now assembled - Marx, Lenin and Engels among them. As the artist who created the park said, only democracy allows you to reflect on dictatorship.

Liz and I took full advantage of our Budapest Cards and travelled by tram (both new and old), bus and metro, as we whirled our way around both Buda and Pest. The public transport of the city is amazing, with linkages and hubs aplenty, and services so frequent there's never any waiting. The whirlwind of transport only added to the scenario of renewed family connections, the analogy complete.

After over thirty years my disparate family's tracks and mine had converged again, and this time the gauges were the same, compatible. Some old stops have been renovated, old carriages reconnected and new ones made, and a new network map and timetable have been established.

It is now possible for us to plan new journeys.