We arrived at Gatwick at 4 am, met up with Hollie and Samantha and checked in. I’ve never been through a check-in so quickly before. No queues. Just strolled up to one of half a dozen ‘First Choice’ desks and that was it. Easy peasy. Even Emily’s managed to smuggle those two illegal immigrants on board without any problems. Boarding the plane was a pleasure. No bloody people in our seats and nobody blocking the aisle while they took ages to sort themselves out. Just on to the plane and……….relax. Once we’d all boarded we were subjected to a thirty minute delay however while, as the pilot told us, we waited for some final documentation to be completed. Well it’s a fine time to tell us that isn’t it? What sort of documentation needs to be completed just before we take off? Surely the pilot’s already got his licence hasn’t he? Or perhaps he’s having trouble filling in his duty-free order slip. Jesus, maybe it’s the first time he’s flown and the airport authorities are having trouble verifying his name.
I was beginning to worry.
I needn’t have done. We eventually took off around 6.30 am and landed at Reus airport at roughly 9.30 am local time. Reus is one of the smallest international airports in Spain and it was like returning to the days of flying twenty years ago. As we waited to disembark I noticed all the passengers from a Ryanair flight walking from their plane to the terminal building. I was quite prepared to do the same but we were ushered on to a shuttle bus which took us instead. As the terminal building was within easy Ryanair walking distance, even taking into account the meandering route that the bus took, no sooner had we all boarded it was time to bloody well get off again – and the Ryanair passengers had easily beaten us to it just by walking. Still, we non-Ryanair passengers had a bus and they didn’t eh? That’s what we paid our non-Ryanair fare price for wasn’t it?
Once inside the terminal building or big shed, we hung around waiting for our luggage. The big shed was sparse to say the least. No signs of life anywhere. No Spanish officials, a couple of small conveyor belts and a sort of makeshift customs gate which looked like a temporary structure that was erected every time a flight arrived. It appeared to be a cardboard cut-out of a gated entrance but you could see around to the left and right of it and although it had two separate gateways, one for ‘Goods to Declare’ and the other for ‘Nothing to Declare’, it was quite possible to walk around either side and into the same area beyond. It wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference if you had because each gate was side by side and took you through to the same area anyway. I was tempted to walk under the ‘Goods to Declare’ cardboard opening just to see if some hidden official would suddenly spring out from his carefully camouflaged hiding place but thought better of it at the last minute.
Then it was on to our hotel transfer coach for a twenty minute ride to the hotel in the company of Alexthefirstchoicerep. Uneventful journey apart from having to listen to the verbal diarrhoea (thank God for spell checkers eh?) of Alexthefirstchoicerep but on checking in at the desk we met our first hitch of the holiday. They told us our rooms weren’t ready and wouldn’t be ready until 12.30 pm. As it was now around 10.45 am and we were all hot, sweaty, tired and thirsty, this didn’t go down too well. The only thing we could do though was to take our luggage down to the basement luggage room where it could be kept under lock and key until our rooms were ready.
We found the luggage room, went in and inside, sitting by the door, was a thin lanky looking black man with some keys in his hand. He didn’t speak but as we walked in he got up from his chair and just kept on getting up.
Jesus, he was tall.
He towered above us. He must have been at least seven feet. His arms and legs we’re so long and dangly that he reminded me of a daddy-long-leg with only four legs after the rest had been pulled off. He walked at a slow pace. I suppose he had to in case his arms and legs got tangled up together and he fell down in a huge tangled mess of limbs and body unable to move. I was pretending not to stare at him when the four girls and Pauline decided that they would unpack some of their shorts/bikinis so that they could kill the waiting time with a spot of sunbathing. The tall man was expecting us to just drop off our cases and return for them later so he was slightly put off guard when cases were being unlocked and various items of female clothing were strewn all over the floor.
He put his keys back into his pocket and went for a tall stroll.
In the meantime the girls had found a toilet and were in there changing while I sat down in the tall man’s chair and waited. Waiting was to feature quite a lot in my forthcoming two weeks. The tall man came back expecting us to be gone so he could lock up but found us all still there with the girls now putting on sun cream and me sitting in his chair. He looked around but before I could get up and offer him his tall chair back he was off again in his wibbly-wobbly walking motion for another dingly-dangly tall man’s stroll.
At last everyone was ready but we couldn’t leave the room because the tall man wasn’t there to lock up. I said I’d hang around until he turned up but this was unnecessary because as soon as the girls left the room he seemed to appear out of nowhere. I think he must have been hiding behind a fishing rod that was stacked in one corner of the room.
By the time we’d killed ninety minutes, returned to the luggage room to collect our bags and finally unpacked in our rooms, Pauline and I were both feeling tired and needed a sleep. Pauline woke late afternoon and spent a few hours by the pool – I didn’t wake. As far as I know the girls spent the whole afternoon by the pool but who knows? As I was fast asleep and having nightmares about big black flying man-eating four-legged daddy-long-legs, the girls could have been anywhere.
We decided to spend our first evening with a stroll into town. Apparently it’s only ten minutes walk away and Pauline had already got directions and a map from Alexthefirstchoicerep so off we all went. After twenty minutes or so and appearing to be the only six people walking along a major dual carriageway leading as far as the eye could see into nothingness, we decided that perhaps we weren’t actually on the way to the town after all. Cutting our losses we turned off on one of the few left turns and found ourselves walking through the grounds of a hotel complex back in the general direction of our hotel. As we passed the front of this hotel Hollie and Emily decided to go in to reception and ask for directions to Salou town.
We waited outside while they spent ages in there, eventually coming out and saying, “We think it’s down this way somewhere,” pointing in the general direction in which we were already going. As this was taking us back to our hotel anyway and there was no sign of any town anywhere near it we were not really any the wiser but we carried on, eventually arriving at our hotel too knackered to start walking again so left the business of going into town for another day.
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