[Lisa29]

Saturday 10 October 2015

It was finally here! Travel up to the airport day had arrived! Work was finished with for 3 weeks, or 4 in Phil's case, lucky thing, and everything was just about packed.

As usual and as expected, I had a lousy night's sleep and was wide awake at 5.15am. I finally decided to get up at 5.45 and did the ironing from the previous days washing (leaving none to come home to), whilst watching Masterchef Australia. I did some tidying before Phil got up at 6.30. He went to put the car through the car wash, check the oil, etc. Madison was up by 6.45 and she read her school book to me so that all of her homework was done. Kaley was up just after 7.

We finished tidying, had breakfast and got dressed, before finishing the last minute packing of hairbrushes, chargers, etc. The girls shared the colouring of the last day on the countdown chart

The last couple of cases were put in the car (the rest had gone to Mum and Dad's the day before), we locked up and were soon on our way to dancing. While the girls did two of their classes each, Phil had gone to take the rubbish and recycling to the tip then we went and got some water for the car journey, a photography magazine for Phil and a sandwich from Gregg's for my Dad.

We went back to dancing, got the girls changed, said bye to everyone then sat in the car to do OLCI as it was now 11am. It took a few minutes of refreshing the screen before it actually allowed me to do it but it was soon done and we had our Dibbers Row seats in the bubble.

From there we nipped to Subway to get lunch (no pics, sorry) and took it to Mum and Dad's to eat. I did OLCI for Mum and Dad and confirmed their two exit row seats in the bubble. Some case rearranging was done, though I don't recall why

Phil loaded the car and we were on our way, a little later than I had wanted, at 12.15. We stopped at a Sainsbury's for petrol near to where we join the M1 and were properly on our way by 12.35.

Happily occupied with their Kindles

Designated driver

The journey went really well, we had been worried about the M6 but the traffic was fine all the way to Manchester. The girls were really good and I think we only had one 'are we nearly there yet' from them. Very soon we started seeing these

So all got a bit excited. We saw quite a few coming in, checking the flight radar app to see what planes they were and where they were coming from.

We were driving into the Marriott at 2.30pm. Unfortunately, as we were early and check in wasn't until 4pm, our room wasn't ready. We had kind of expected it wouldn't be, and knew it definitely wouldn't when we pulled in and saw a full car park and a very big Wedding party spilling out of the lobby onto the front.

We decided to go to the Airport Pub, taking rather too many wrong turns on the way, oops! We finally got there to find a line of cars waiting to pull into the car park, the gates of which had been closed, with a security guard advising people the car park was full and there was an hour and a half wait for a table. This was all because a Vulcan Bomber was scheduled to be doing a flyover at 3pm. We were on double yellows so couldn't wait, so decided to try and find somewhere else to watch planes/see the Vulcan Bomber.

We found another car park a few minutes away and pulled up at the barrier, pressed the button to get in and promptly just sat there as there was something wrong with the machine! An engineer-type guy came over and told us to press the call button, Phil did, spoke to someone and explained the problem and he said he would make a call. The same engineer-type guy who told us to press the call button then received a call on his mobile from the person Phil was speaking to! Why we had to go through that process when he could have looked there and then, I have no idea. At least 10 minutes had passed at this point, someone had parked on the road behind us, blocking us in, so we were stuck and of course it was now around 3pm and the Vulcan Bomber went over. Phil was gutted. We hadn't realised it was so close so hadn't got the cameras out. Phil saw the person who had blocked us in and asked him to move his car. He did and we moved to the car park across the way and parked there. (At this point, the engineer still hadn't been over.)

We stayed here for a bit watching the planes taking off

Before deciding to head back to the Marriott. We then got stuck in a queue of about 7 cars because the barrier wouldn't open! :angry: This took a good 5-10 minutes (the same engineer working on the pay machine in the car park that the barrier wouldn't open for ) before finally it started working.

Quite a disappointing experience, we had really been looking forward to going to the Airport Pub and seeing some planes, never mind, maybe next time we will have better luck.

We got to the Marriott about 3.50 and went in. Everyone else was there by now and all trying to check in. This is where a small run of bad luck started for Mum and Dad, their room still wasn't ready and ended up not being ready until gone 4.30pm, not good enough really when check in is 4pm.

Anyway, we were given our room number, 0-704, and got lost trying to find it! I'm sure at one point we ended up back near the lobby area. Looking on the wrong floor didn't help us either!

Finally we found it, and it was a nice big room

Continued in next post.