Adventures and travel.

 Last night I went to bed at about 10.00pm. This was because i had to get up at around 2.30am this morning. Amazingly I managed to do so without snoozing my alarm several timex over! A taxi was coming to collect us at 3.15am to take us to Manchester airport for a flight to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where Phil is going to take part in a chess tournament and I am going to take part in tourist activities. 

We have walked miles and miles around Manchester airport, a confusing airport made more confusing by “improvements” and on arrival here around the airport of Gran Canaria, which is enormous and potentially just as confusing as Manchester. We had to go through the new rigmarole of having our fingerprints recorded! Then we had to locate the place where we are going to sleep tonight. We have complicated arrangements to share an Air B&B with a chess playing friend but that does not include tonight. 

We (or rather, Phil) had researched buses from the airport to Las Palmas. Finding the bus stop was a challenge, involving a further long to the end of the airport complex, across a carpark and onto the regular public bus service place. But eventually we got here and, as we could not get into tonight’s accommodation straight away, we found a place to have lunch: tortilla española (the restaurant prides itself on being experts in making tortilla and have been doing so since 1985 - just a little longer than I have been doing so) and an ensalada mixta.

Then we tried to get into tonight’s accommodation, a room in a suite of similar rooms, with no receptionist on duty. To get in you need a key code for the street door and the inner door to the suite of rooms, then another code to open a mini safe containing the key to our room. Ingenious and probably perfectly logical to habitual users of such accommodation. Unfortunately they had not sent us the instructions and the codes by email as promised. A series of complicated phone calls ensued. We got in. We had a snooze to make up for the missed night’s sleep and the impossibility of sleeping comfortably on Ryanair planes!

And finally we had to go through further rigmarole to discover which wifi we should connect to and what the code for said wifi might be.

All’s well that ends well! Another adventure begins.

I hear they have had snow in Greater Manchester!

Oh, at the restaurant we had a bottle of water from a place called Teror, a place up in the mountains, about 14 kilometres from Las Palmas city. I was amused at the idea of fierce and frightening mineral water. It really doesn’t take much to entertain me!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!