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Published: August 19th 2007
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Saturday 4th August 2007
We arrived at Manchester Airport courtesy of our very own personal chauffeur (one Mr G Thomas), unfortunately we had to be dropped off in a carpark 5 mins walk away from departures, due to the new security arragements after the recent attacks at Glasgow airport. After a short time spent queuing, we checked in with
xl.com and got rid of the cases. George and Eleanor chose our restuarant for this evening - a certain burger fast food outlet (which cannot be named for legal reasons but more of that later!).
For some reason there seemed to be strange lack of flight info screens in T2 at
Manchester Airport and as I had my eyes tested just last week, it can't be my specs! We walked about a mile just to find the gate number etc on the one and only screen we could find! Not to worry our flight was due out on time from gate 210. The kids were fascinated to see our plane being refuelled prior to us boarding!
We took off about 10 mins late which is quite good, and after the usual safety briefings settled in for our journey.
After 45mins
or so the captain announced that we we over Germany and would be landing in just under 3 hours. this was folled 2 minutes later by an apology, saying we were actually over Holland and can anybody direct him to Kos! Our lives in their hands.......
The flight was fine with the usual helping of a 'school dinner' mid flight! Our pilot manged to find his way to Kos Airport (I guess he some kind of computer/sat nav thingy to help him out?!) and we were hearded like sheep through the airport to our bags etc.
As ever the tour operator (in our case 'Olympic Holidays') feels that you, as a tourist are incapable of stepping onto a coach without the help of 19 year old student, AKA your 'rep', we were then directed, like small children on an excursion to 'our coach'.
How do they think we got to the UK airport? Did they pick us up at home? No! I rest my case, we are all adults and we can figure it out if you would only give us the chance. But like lambs to the slaughter we Brits allow ourselves to be herded onto
the relevant coach, while we ask the Greek driver if he is going to '
Oasis Apartments'? (in a funny Greek/Spanish/Turkish accent that nobody, never mind a Greek coach driver, could possibly understand) Why the strange accent? It's us who can't speak more than one language not the people who work in ANY of the resorts in Europe!
After a trip around 7 different hotels, we finally got dropped off at our apartments. All looked OK, pretty much as it did in the brochure. The room was clean and adequate and the bar was still open at 1am, which meant we could all grab a much needed drink before bedtime. We had read numerous bad reviews on forums about the manager 'Nikos' and I was intrigued to meet the man for myself. I was pleasantly supprised to be greated by the boss himself at 1am in the bar and he couldn't have been more happy to help a family of tired and thirsty travellers! 10/10 Nikos.
Zzzz.
Sunday 5th August 2007
OK, so far so good! Everything was going as smoothly it could, until....I awoke at 3am with deli belly! Too much detail I hear you
cry...well sorry I shall continue (well at least briefly!). Having enjoyed a burger at Manchester Airport and a 'meal' on the flight it had to be one or the other (a few enquiries later in the day narrowed the cause to the fast food outlet, but proving it would of course involve a long and arduous court case!). Having had numerous encounters with the bathroom in the night I finally nodded off to a deep sleep at around 7am. This all proved to be quite challenging when the bathroom was designed in such a way that the sink actually over hung the toilet! Not forgetting to put you toilet paper in the bin rather than in the toilet due to Greek's narrow sewer system.
7.30am brought cries of 'wake up Dad, we're on holiday' and numerous groans of 'Go back to sleep' from me! I gave in at 8.30am and fed George & Eleanor a cooked breakfast in the hotel while I starved to death quietly in the corner. The kids then headed into the pool, which they soon adopted as their second home. 1.30pm brought another strange custom - the 'Welcome Meeting'. I duly dragged the kids out
of the pool to see if we could gleen some info on where to visit at a fraction of Olympic's charge by going 'independently', yes that's right, without the aid of a coach and tour rep. Later in the week my suspicions of a lifetime were confirmed! The rep, Kate, informed me they were on 2% commision for all the trips they sold, but only got paid this commission if they worked the whole season, i.e. a little sweetener to discourage them from quitting early. However, she also let slip that at least 2 rep's had already left in the middle of the high season. I'll leave you to judge Olympic's reputation as an employer. Overall the 'sales meeting', oops, I mean 'welcome meeting' wasn't informative (shock horror) and we learnt more from a €5 guide book on Kos. We duly returned to the pool to chill out while the rep relieved several fellow guests of large amounts of cash in exchange for 'excusrsions'.
This was later followed by what was meant to be 30mins sleep in the apartment but turned out as 4 hours (oops) and then food in the hotel bar (I managed to hold onto some soup for more than 30 seconds - sorry too much detail again).
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