Our flight qualified us to be able to visit the BA Lounge, so we headed up there and settled in for the couple of hours we have before the flight leaves. Boarding starts aroung 11:20.

[08:55 US+1] We pushed back from the terminal pretty much to time - 12:30 and we took off 20 minutes later.

We were travelling in Club World on BA as a treat for our 30th Anniversary. The seats were facing each other in pairs so it was easy to see each other during the flight. The flight itself was OK, not much turbulance for a change. I only watched one short movie on the plane - Belfast, which I quite enjoyed.

I'd intended to use my laptop during the flight, but it seems that the charger was pulling too much power so the activity light on the seat plug immediately went out each time I plugged in the charger (even without the laptop attached). Thus I was limited to the 90 minutes the laptop provided on battery only.

Once down in the ground we were one of the first into the security area. However, once we were called, the guy seemed to be having IT issues with his system so we stood about waiting at his desk whilst he attempted to process our entry. The queue was getting longer and longer behind us. Eventually, he gave up and moved to another lane only for that one to also have scanner issues! Finally attempt number 3 worked! In the distance we could see all our cases wandering along on the baggage carousel so once through is was easy to pickup.

Car pickup was painless. We had to get a second train from the main terminal to the car rental base. We've gone with Enterprise and now have a Ford Expedition which had plenty of room for the cases in the boot!

Tampa to Anna Maria is about a hour drive and it went smoothly, the car was quite nice to drive even though it's pretty large. It has cooled seating, which blows cool air through the bottom and back of the seats. That's pretty nice when you've got to put up with temperatures around 92'F (33'C). Plus as it's September, the humidity is still very high, much more that we'd normally see in October. We also have a toll pass in the hire which just books any toll pass direct to the credit card - that'll make life easier I think. We only have one toll that we usually cross, the Skyway Bridge, mind.

We made good time in getting to the island. We had to pick up the keys from the rental location, however the keys were not in the drop box as expected, so I had to call people out (it's a Bank Holiday - Labor Day - here today) to find the right keys.

We just made it to the apartment in time to catch the first sunset..

We quickly dropped off the cases and popped back out to Publix to pick up some basics for tomorrows breakfast. One thing we did notice - just how expecsive the food has become over here. Generally that was true for the US, but we were seeing some loaves of bread on sale for $4.50 - about £3.90!

We stayed up as late as we could manage, but by 10pm we were out for the count. We'd been up since 4.45am and it was now 3am the next day!