IanHi all, so home time has come! It’s been an awesome trip to Portugal and I’ve loved every minute of it! It was a very busy day filled with delays!
Home time is never a great time when you have been away, but alas it has come! We started the day as we usually do, although we did make sure we were earlier this time. We had breakfast and completed our final packing check and grabbed an Uber to the airport.
Unfortunately, this is when the delays started, a usually 35-minute drive took over an hour, and a lot of that reason is because of the weather, as you saw on yesterday’s blog it was raining heavily. It got worse overnight and winds picked up causing damage to cars and blocking roads.
We were randomly dropped off at a bus stop near the airport as the driver “didn’t want to go in stop-start travel” at the terminal, so we had to walk, luckily it wasn’t too far! The next delay was check-in, the board said we could check in but they weren’t ready so had to wait 30 minutes there.
After we had checked in our bags we headed to security to get airside, we were quick here due to having fast track. So we thought things were going to continue to move smoothly, we headed to the gift shops and got some gifts for myself then headed to the lounge for an hour and thought we had timed perfectly from where the lounge was to the gates. However, that was not the case…. this was the next delay. They were only allowing EU citizens to use the electronic passport kiosk while the rest of us had to wait in line for in-person passport control. We had to wait 20 minutes to get through.
We had to bolt to the gate as we were first to board… again, we were hit with another delay, this time with British Airways. Boarding was delayed by 30 minutes due to the previous plane coming in later! But the delays did not stop there, we then had to wait another 30 minutes on the bus to get to the plane!
Finally, we got onto the plane only to be told we’d be delayed a further 50 minutes due to the weather in Portugal being terrible. By this time I had enough, I was tired and fed up with waiting! But we got there in the end!
Eventually, we took off at 14:30 a massive delay from the original! The flight itself was fine, the food was nice and they kept us stocked up with drinks and snacks which was good. It was a smooth flight, a little turbulence taking off and halfway through the journey but fine.
Back on British soil and my day was already waiting for us, this was the final delay of the trip… due to the lateness of the flight, it took over 2 hours to get home! But thanks to Dad we are now home!
Overall we had an awesome time and are already looking to plan our next trip! So stay tuned. I will also be doing a review of the trip tomorrow and covering what we got up to so follow along!
