The adventure ends

As often seems usual, the best of the weather was today, out last. Glorious clear blue sky and warm sunshine all day long.

Carl got a taxi to San Fernando to pick up his man-bag with its repaired zip and we met at the Siroco bar/restaurant afterwards for breakfast. This is the place we refer to as The German Bar. It's on Avenida de Alemania, beside the supermarket we go to. After that it was back to the bungalow for packing and waiting first for the mobility scooter to be collected and then for out taxi to arrive to take us to the airport. We treated ourselves to a couple of small beers in Pepe's restaurant while we waited.

The 'taxi' turned out to be a multi-seater coach which we had all to ourselves. Our driver wasted no time to get us to the airport (Canarian drivers generally don't waste any time). Our flight was at 18:55 and the taxi picked us up at 16:00, which we thought was ridiculously early. As it turned out, it was a bit of a rush at the special assistance area and through security and passport control. It was all a bit of a mess, and certainly the worst assistance operation we've experienced at any airport yet. Our usual routine at this airport is to sit outdoors at the terrace bar which has a fine view of the planes on the apron area and out to sea, but this time we were whisked through passport control and straight to a departure gate which had one sorry little bar which closed its shutter just as we arrived. The silly people at Special Assistance mis-read our boarding pass and thought we were catching the Ryanair flight at 17:00. To make things worse, Aer Lingus suffered a problem with their website which caused Carl's electronic boarding pass to vanish from his phone. He and I spent ages trying to sort things out and were rather stressed by the time we boarded out flight.

Out pilot warned us to expect turbulence on the way home and also said headwinds would make us twenty minutes late landing at Dublin. As it happened, we landed more or less on schedule, time being saved by cruising at a lower altitude and below the turbulence. Special assistance at Dublin was excellent and we sailed through and down to the taxi rank. As we got our of the terminal building, though, we were hit by a wall of cold air which reminded us with a vengeance that we were indeed back on home turf.