Starting our holiday early

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Our original plans were to start our holiday on Tuesday 8^thSeptember, but George´s Mum sadly passed away last week, and we needed to be in England for the funeral tomorrow.

The flights for our travel today have been extortionately expensive, so we are going to stay with Theresa´s sister until our planned start time, rather than trying to travel back home again.

Our original flight on the 8^th September was from Tenerife to London Gatwick, but all planes on that route were fully booked for today, so we flew Tenerife South to Birmingham instead using Monarch.

We have not flown Monarch for many years and were both impressed with how clean and spacious the plane looked.

Unfortunately, after being up in the air for just a few minutes the pilot spoke to the customers to advise that the sensors on the toilets were not working right and there would only be one toilet in operation for our four hour flight. He did advise that if enough people wanted him to, he could turn the plane back to Tenerife. As today was one of the last flying days before the children in UK go back to school, we think everyone just wanted to get home. As far as we know there were no complaints.

We subsequently sent off a constructive complaint to them about this and have received a £50.00 compensation voucher off a future flight. Awkward complaints like this are best constructed commenting on the positive aspects before the negative points. This was an easy result.

As we flew over London Heathrow airport, from up above, we clearly saw ‘Concorde’ parked up at one of the two secret locations within Heathrow.

Other than the toilet issue, the flight was without issue, and we landed at Birmingham ahead of schedule.

We picked up a hire car that we will drop off in Gatwick on 8^th September and recommenced our original plans. Again, our car hire company looked after us by providing a second driver for free. We were given the choice of two cars. We were offered a black two door Corsa or an orange four door Aygo. Although it was a very bright colour, we decided on the Aygo, as we needed four doors for the amount of luggage we had.

Tonight we stayed at the Ramada at Oxford services located at M40 Junction 8A. Luckily it was not too noisy so we both got a fairly good night sleep and were ready for the Funeral the next day. This provided a nice surprise with a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Waitrose onsite.

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