28 March, 2006

Playa de la Arena - Barcelo Veradero - Holiday report - Day 1

Gatwick - North Terminal
So...set the wayback machine to last Friday - we were zipped by my folks to Gatwick's North Terminal (thanks!) for a bit of shopping (got an external battery for the PSP for a tenner, bonus!), a full English breakfast and then the long walk to the gate (the furthest one away, of course)...The flight was really bumpy and slow because of some seriously strong wind going in quite the wrong direction, and for quite a lot of the journey the pilot was pinging the seatbelt sign on and off (much to the annoyance of a mother and child in front of us who didn't seem to want to sit in their seat at all)...
Arrived at the Airpuerto...
We landed to 21 degrees, bright blue skies and (unfortunately) 35mph wind! Grabbed our luggage (which came out nice and quickly) and swept out into the car park, luckily our coach was the first one in the rank... ;) Unluckily there was a closed road in the direction we needed to travel, so the (should have been) 50 minute transfer actually took over 2 hours...bah... :(
Found the coach...
When we eventually got to the resort there was a bit of confusion to deal with, somewhere along the line they had mucked up our booking and only had one room ready for the four of us, but with the appropriate paperwork dug from bottom of bag that was quickly sorted (or so we thought)...We dragged the luggage upstairs, collapsed in exhaustion for a while (doing some gentle unpacking type things and popping down to the resorts mini-supermarket) when Flyingpops' folks came ringing at our door saying that all was *not* well! When they had opened the door to their room they discovered another families stuff all over the place! Thinking themselves rather lucky that the occupants weren't present, they had hurried back down to reception and a red faced clerk had issued *another* room key (this one unnoccupied) only to discover that in this apartment the door wouldn't shut properly and the safe didn't work!
First meal!
Anyway, once all that nonsense was sorted out we dived out for dinner, I had serloin steak with Roquefort (jolly nice too)...in the Neptune Resturant right on the Playa de la Arena...
And it was St Patricks day...
Then, as it was St Particks day we had a few suitably coloured drinks in the local Irish bar (listening to a one woman Irish karaoke) down by the beach...returning quite early to bed as exhausted by the days long journey, but full and warm and happy...then for some odd reason I left the aircon on all night and we woke up at about 4am absolutely freezing...whoops!

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