The flight to Dubai seems to go quickly, without the need for sleep. We are a little bit late and when we get off the plane we have to go down in a lift and get a train to our next starting gate. The terminal is an enormous shiny giant of a building. Eventually we arrive in Duty free. I'll get a drink of lemonade I think. £9.00! I'll wait. On board the next plane the layout is the same so I settle down to watch one of the many choices. Too many choices, so I put something on I can fall asleep to. Tired but sleep is elusive, so I open my tablet and start reading a John Grisham thriller. That's more like it.

My grandmother went to Australia in 1965. Like me she was a widow and wanted to see her two sisters who emigrated with their families in the 1950s on the £10 ticket. My great aunts Gladys and Eva were part of the great wave of people from the UK who accepted Australia's off to come and start a new life thee. It was enormously brave, most people would never have been out of the UK, and the war had decimated parts of Liverpool so it must have seemed like a fabulous oportunity but very scary. They didn't fly of course, they went by boat and that's what my grandmother did, and it took 6 weeks to get to Melbourne where they had settled.

I remember mum making evening dresses for my Nana, out of pieces of silk from the market, to wear at the restaurants and of course at the captain's table. I still have the fancy menus she was given for each special meal, including the one where they crossed the time line and moved to a new day.

I don't know when we crossed that line in the air, but at some point it became December 1st.

Mum and Dad had already followed my trailblazing grandmother but by plane on a journey that took them to Singapore, where they ate at Raffles and Dad had a linen jacket hand tailored, before they went onto Melbourne to meet the now extended family, and got to drive the F1 circuit. They where visiting Mum's cousins and I hope to meet some of them and their children and grandchildren. I have with me photos taken by my grandmother in 1965 and by Mum and Dad in 2000 to show them.

What will this trip be like for me? I hope I get to know Stu's family better, and wish so much he was with me. But life is different now and I'm travelling all these miles alone, knowing how much he would have loved to be with me. But he is with me in my heart and mind and I will love to tell his family about him, and all the things he did do, enjoying travelling to other countries and early days on our canal boat with our children. There's lots of stories to tell!