Off to Sharm!

Got up at stupid o’clock to make the 45 min drive to the car park at Gatwick. All in all, a good drive, simple park and courier into the airport, with a good quick check in.

Ate breakfast at Frankie and Bennie’s, trekked to gate, boarded plane and this was where the fun started.

The leg room was ridiculously short. I am not in the least bit fat, but have a leg length of just under 34” and I was forced to sit with my knees wide apart, and poor old Chris with his 6’7” frame stood no chance at all. Fortunately, a couple of seats by the front bulkhead were free and the steward let Chris move into one while I remained as originally seated and shared Chris’ old seat with the other passenger in our row.

It was a very uncomfortable five hour flight with a TV I could not see and a headphone jack that was distorted. Oh, and the lady in front decided to put her seat back. With restricted leg room, putting the seat back should not be an option!

I didn’t say anything to her though, feeling that, as I had the use of the centre empty seat, a luxury that the lady didn’t have, it would have been churlish to ask her to put it back up, and instead sprawled over the two seats.

So, you know, I was kinda grumpy when we landed, and had a go at Chris for getting wound up at the queue to get into the terminal building. I managed to keep it together at the heaving multidirectional crowd inside the terminal building.

But somewhere in the third set of queues, which was in fact several queuelets funnelling into one, and watching the people from two flights after ours go through from other queuelets, temper started to go. This was exacerbated by Scottish lady shoving me out of her way with her overly large bag and then calling over her three family members to come and join her, going so far as to lean across and put her hand on the barrier between us and the family in front that we were speaking with.

It was a crowd style queue rather than an orderly one so we queued jumped only very slightly ourselves, moving position and ending up neck and neck with Scottish woman (it turns out that she was Glaswegian. Does that even count as Scottish?), and she tried the same manoeuvre again. But having sussed her, I kept myself glued to the very nice bright orange cardy of the lady in front until Scottish woman backed off and accepted place behind us.

Eventually, nearly two hours after arriving, we queued our way to passport control, which was approximately twenty feet to the right of where we’d first come into the terminal building.

On the up side, we did not need to wait for baggage reclaim. By the time we got there, the conveyor belt had given up working, and our luggage was among a dozen or so other cases scattered forlornly around the area.

Eventually got to our coach and had to wait on that for another half hour before we had everyone on board. There was no Scottish woman on board, much to Chris’ relief – he wasn’t looking forward to the paperwork that was going to be a result of me indulging in a spot of garrotting. Of course we were the (next to) last people to be dropped off.

And from here things got a lot better. The bellboys are wonderful, as they always are. The room is lovely, and I really, really love the whole ‘all-in’ idea. Is kinda like a cruise ship – food available in various forms from 6am to 2am, and alcohol is included too. Fabulous.

Had rather nice buffet dinner, took a stroll around the hotel complex, looked at the stars from our beach, watched the South Park DVD I’d bought at Gatwick, then crashed.