The sun is shining in Stalybridge!

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We didn’t pack an Apple Watch charger in our hand luggage so both our watches went flat during our layover in Dubai. Oops, just when I was closing in on a new longest move streak. I only had three days to go!! Ah well, it was always going to be difficult anyway being cooped up on aeroplanes for the best part of 24 hours.

It was early Friday morning local time by the time we were due to continue our journey to Manchester. Fortunately we didn’t need to change terminals at Dubai and, in fact, only had a fairly short walk from our arrival gate to the lounge and then to our departure gate. Sometimes it’s much more of a marathon effort when transiting through Dubai!!

We pushed back from the terminal pretty much on time, maybe about 10 minutes late, but we queued for so long awaiting our actual take off that I fell asleep and missed it. On this leg of the journey I finished watching the entire second season of ‘Rosehaven’. I watched the first two (three?) episodes between Melbourne and Dubai so watched the rest of the season on the second leg of the journey. I followed this up with chick flick ‘I Feel Pretty’. I missed the last two minutes though because after all of the PA interruptions, during which the movie was on hold, it ran for longer than the flight did!

We landed just after noon which had us in Manchester pretty much right on time. Then it was the joy of queueing to be processed by immigration before heading to the baggage carousel hoping that our bags were transferred between planes at Dubai. Our timing for the immigration queue was pretty good. Although we had to queue for a while, the number of people behind us was huge by the time we were having our passports stamped. We also did well at the baggage carousel with only a couple of minutes wait before our bags appeared.

We dragged our luggage out to the bus stop to catch the bus to the Hire Car Village. We had a bit of a wait there and then, of course, two busses arrived at once. A short ride later and we were queued up again, this time at the AVIS desk. There was no Nissan Juke on the lot so Bernie was offered an Astra. He decided to pass on that and upgraded to a VW Golf.

Finally, we were in charge of our own transportation rather than beholden to airline seating allocations and timetables! Bernie hooked his phone up and entered Kath and Albert’s address into Google maps. It wasn’t long before we recognised where we were and we were able to clear the route and continue from memory.

After a quick stop down at the Tesco supermarket - to buy beer and wine, so that we didn’t arrive empty handed - we pulled into the drive at our home away from home. It was a beautiful afternoon in Stalybridge so we headed out onto the back patio for drinks. Kath and I polished off two bottles of cider pretty quickly!

After dinner it was time to play cards with both the Cromptons winning on our first night. Kath won Jo and Albert won Blobs.



Steps: 2,572 (All that was recorded before my watch went flat!)

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