I allowed 1 hour and 30 minutes extra to get to Gatwick for 9:00 thinking that was plenty of leeway to cover even our crap roads … I was wrong!
Robin was a star fighting through the traffic but there were so many hold-ups there was really nothing he could do.
We turned up just about 15 minutes after we should have and the queues were horrendous. It took an age to get through check-in and then quite some time to get through security. By the time we finally got through we were already being called to the gate so our breakfast was out of the window and by now, we were all getting a little hungry.
We grabbed some sandwiches from a vendor for the price of what we would get used to paying for a full meal and drinks for all of us in Gran Canaria and ate them en route to the gate which seemed to be somewhere just outside Brighton!
Irony is a cruel thing and we discovered there was a slight delay on our flight but only after we arrived! We could have had breakfast after all.
The flight was a fair bit delayed by the time we finally took off and more so on the way over. We were at least an hour late by the time we got to Las Palmas. This was compounded by some idiot leaving their bag on the plane (or something like that) so we had to wait in the coach for an age. I think it was around 6pm by the time we finally arrived in resort.
We unpacked which is just about the most unusual thing for me to do when I arrive somewhere but we were so shattered it was all we wanted to do.
Our meal was in the Taipei just up the road. This being a buffet of something they had probably cooked several days ago and had gone way beyond sell by date in 1998. To say it was awful is an insult to awful. Nothing tasted even a little like what would be expected, it was just totally disgusting. They couldn’t even get the Coke right, one of those was just coloured water.
From there we were to Pub Nestor for the evening and Matt was well impressed when Gary remembered my name from last year. Gary is one of the barmen there. It is quite conceivable that me and Matt both got a little too tipsy.