Sunday 12th October
An 8am start from home. We had wanted to leave a little earlier as there had been fog forecast along our route. But as it turned out we left at our originally planned time. As it turned out, the fog was a lot lighter than we'd feared, just some around J5 on the M25 but that was about it. We arrived at Gatwick South and headed for the self parking. This is a new one for us as we've previously only ever one done a park-and-fly and that involved a mini-bus transfer. Usually we do the meet-and-greet but this time we headed for the Gatwick Premier valet car park. This is a self parking area where they take your keys and move the car later to another area, returning it to the same car park on your return. The benefit of this is that you are, literally, right by the entrance to departures, even on the right floor. So actually it was just as fast as meet-and-greet, without the rush of unloading the car. Would do that again!
Checking in the bags was pretty quick, a few in front of us in the PE line. We then headed through to security. I'd noticed a silver 'fast access' sticker had appeared on our boarding passes, so we headed to their 'Gatwick Premier' security gate - basically a normal gate but with more staff and less passengers. I still beeped at the metal detector though. Don't know why as there was nothing metal on me.
I'm now sitting in the sunny Aspire lounge waiting for Linda to return from her Duty Free trip.
Flight is expected to be a little later than scheduled - maybe 15 minutes. It seems the inbound flight was later arriving this morning.
The flight seemed to be called and start boarding immediately. This meant that by the time we arrived at Gate 21, the queue was pretty long to get into the aircraft Ruby Tuesday.
408 people (including 8 babies) plus 13 crew were boarded pretty quickly, but even then we didn't take off until 13:50.
The flight was pretty uneventful. Just a little turbulence around Iceland.
Watched a couple of films - Edge of Tomorrow (enjoyed that). Million ways to Die in the West (meh). Planes Firefighters (OK).
We landed around 17:45 and we were within the first 10 off the plane. Luckily, there was no-one in the immigration area so we didn't bother with the new speed exit machines as there was no need. Also, the speed machines appeared to be in the area for US citizens, so I was wary of travelling over there as if it wasn't for UK people, then we'd lose our place in the main queue.
We were out and in the car within a hour of landing. Before we got too far, we stopped at a local Walmart to pick up some basic foodstuffs for tomorrows breakfast. Then it was off on the two hour drive to Anna Maria. By now it was almost 20:00. Fortunately, although it was a long drive (especially after a 9 hour flight) it was uneventful and all in the dry - although we did spot the odd lightning flash ahead of us in the distance.
Arriving at Anna Maria we drove to the rental office to pick up the keys. However, the drop-box was empty! So we phoned an emergency number who said they would get out the after hours maintenance guy. It was now 22:00 and we were both dead tired. The operator had no way of calling the maintenance guy directly and had to reply on electronic messages (email?). From last year we knew that the maintenance people cannot phone us directly on a UK number, so we just had to wait and keep on at the operator for updates. Eventually (20 minutes maybe?) a young guy turned up. Fortunately, he had keys to the office as our envelope with our keys and parking permit were all sitting on the desk near the door. Linda was not best pleased!
So we didn't get into the apartment until just before 23:00. We'd been on the go for 22 hours by then so all we did was crash out in bed.