Sorry passengers, your flight has been diverted

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Because we are not travelling until this afternoon we decided to sleep in a bit (more than usual!) and go down for a later breakfast. This proved to be a bad idea as the dining room was ridiculously busy at 9.30am! We had to wait for a table for the first time and then queue up for our food!!

The front desk told us that we could checkout late at noon so we thought that we could take our time to pack our bags after breakfast. Unfortunately the cleaning staff were not at all keen on the idea of us having a late checkout and they kept knocking on the door or just letting themselves in because they were dead keen to make up the room!! By 11.15am we were packed and sick of being interrupted so we went down to the foyer to use our last half an hour of internet time.

After checking our emails and updating the blog we left our bags in the luggage room before heading back to the tapas bar for a light lunch with Kath and Albert. Our incongruous sight of the day was a sea front shop on the way to the tapas bar selling Aboriginal artefacts. Who exactly would go to Spain to buy a boomerang???!

At the tapas bar, we had the albondigas and the patates brava again and added some calamares a la Romana to our order. Today we ordered two small beers and a jug of sangria to wash our meal down! The food was really nice again and the sangria went down a treat! It was a stronger mix than they were making at the hotel!!

From the tapas bar we walked back along the sea front to the bar that Kath and Albert have been frequenting each afternoon for the last fortnight. After a drink there it was time to head back to the hotel to wait for the coach to take us to the airport.

The coach was due between 2.45pm and 3.15pm so we were out the front of the hotel at 2.45pm. Of course the Estival Park was the last pick up so the coach arrived to collect us at 3.15pm! We were delivered to Reus airport where we queued up with all the sunburned Poms to check in. Our four bags weighed in at exactly our allowed luggage allowance so we didn’t have to open our bags to turf out all our toiletries as many others were doing!! The only slight concern that we had was that the woman on the check in counter thought that our Australian passports were very dodgy and she spent some time perusing them to find the stamps that showed that we entered the UK legally before traveling to Spain. Eventually she was satisfied that she wasn’t sending illegal aliens back to England!

Much to Kath and Albert’s surprise our return flight to Manchester boarded right on time. They usually find that these charter flights are notorious for being delayed, especially on the return leg. So, we boarded on time and we took off on time and our in-flight drinks were served and then our meals. Just as the meals were being cleared away was when it all went pear-shaped.

The captain came onto the PA and announced that ‘The Company’ had just told him to take the plane to East Midlands airport instead of Manchester airport!! He was very sorry, he didn’t know what the problem was, but he had been directed to land at East Midlands and he would tell us more when he was told more!!! East Midlands is about one and a half hours short of Manchester so this diversion did rather throw our plans into disarray!

By the time that we landed at East Midlands the captain was able to tell us that coaches would be waiting to take us on to Manchester. With the evening getting away from us we were concerned about collecting our hire car from Manchester so as soon as we landed Bernie called Hertz to see if we could collect a hire car from East Midlands airport instead. The Hertz staff were very good and re-booked our car hire so that we could collect our car virtually straight away and drive ourselves to Stalybridge rather than take a coach to Manchester airport and then still have to travel from the airport to Stalybridge.

It was only a little bit squashy fitting all four of us - and our luggage - in a Ford Focus! And to think that Tracy was going to collect Kath and Albert from Manchester airport because we thought it would be too squashy with all four of us in the hire car for the half hour drive from Manchester airport to Stalybridge!! We arrived at Quarry Clough shortly after 9.00pm and we are quite sure that we were much earlier than we would have been if we had waited for the coach trip arranged by Thomas Cook.

We unpacked our bags tonight so that we could make a start on our washing and discovered a disaster of monumental proportions! The snow globe of La Sagrada Familia is broken. Bernie started unpacking and found that some of his clothing was damp. The culprit turned out to be the snow globe which had cracked in transit leaking its contents through his bag. Oh dear!

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