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Published: November 6th 2011
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Today we start our epic journey home. We think it's around 6000 miles.
We have booked a taxi to collect us from the apartment at 8.00 this morning, so did not have to be up too early.
Check in at the airport all went according to plan. Were a bit surprised that we did not get charged for our extra bag as this is the longest leg of our 4 journeys so far over the last three weeks.
The flight from St Thomas to San Juan in Puerto Rico took 23 minutes. As soon as we got comfortable it was time to get off again.
We had been warned many years ago that Puerto Rico was expensive and it certainly seems to be that way.
In the airport. we found a small bar, one of only a few places that serve a sit down meal, and had one course each and one drink each and it came to $35 (about £25) without an expected tip.
We have five long hours to wait here, so we buy some bottles of drink and locate ourselves in the lounge near to an electricity socket. In USA, it is an acceptable practice to use the sockets in the airport to charge up phones and laptops etc. We do not have internet access here, but manage to keep ourselves occupied for the time we are waiting.
Our next overnight flight is an Iberia flight from San Juan to Madrid.
About half an hour before the flight was due to start boarding, we were called to the check in desk. We thought our luck was in and we were going to get an upgrade – no such luck.
The clerk advised us that we had to pay for our two excess bags. We advised that we only had three bags between us so there was only one excess bag. It turned out that when they were booked into St Thomas this morning they were all incorrectly listed under George’s name. We were advised that they would have to retrieve our bags from the hold and recheck them in, then we would have to pay for the one additional bag – about $60. We explained that earlier in our holiday we had enquired about the additional bag for this leg and were told that there would be no cost for it.
We returned to our seats to wait.
When they started calling the priority boarders to board the plane, we enquired what was happening with regards to our bags. We were told that we would have to wait a little longer for the supervisor to come back.
Once they started boarding for the main cabin, we started to worry a little, thinking back to the issue on the plane to St Thomas where our bags were a long way from us and someone tried to take our laptop. We made our presence known and enquired again and got a very helpful clerk. He called the supervisor for us and then advised that they were not, after all, going to charge us for the extra bag. We were free to get on the flight at the right time now. We were in the air by 6.00pm for the last hour of day light over the Caribbean before darkness loomed and the dreaded night flight. Luckily we managed to get some sleep so the flight was over quite quickly. Travelling with Iberia met we had the luxury of a spacious jumbo. It was an eight hour flight with the clocks going back an hour. The onboard service was outstanding.
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