When we got up this morning after another rough night at sea we were back where we started from, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Some other lucky people would be in cabin 7050 tonight, just starting their cruise, whereas for us our holiday is finished. 🙁
At the end of each voyage every passenger receives a copy of the Cruise Log and we eagerly looked to see how many nautical miles the Braemar had sailed this trip. I have always kept track of all the nautical miles we’ve done and we needed 2,634 to make our grand total reach an impressive 100,000. How many had we done? Unbelievably, we’d sailed a total of 2,624. I could not believe it… we were only 10 miles short. 10 miles!! So we’ve done a total of 99,990 nautical miles and will have to wait until our next cruise to reach our milestone. 🙁
We had a decent breakfast in the Palms Café, then went back and picked up our carry-on bags, before having a final look around the cabin to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. Then it was off to the Coral Club to await our call to disembark around 11.00am.
What else can I write? When the time came, we disembarked the Braemar and boarded the coach that was waiting to take us to the airport, a ride of about 40 minutes. Once we arrived it was straight to security, as we already had the boarding passes for our 1510 Jet2 flight. But this meant we would have a good couple of hours in the Executive Lounge beforehand. 🙂
The exec lounge at Tenerife airport is really very good. It is quite large and has a good range of drinks and snacks to which passengers can just help themselves. There are nice big windows giving great views of the aircraft taking off and landing and there was, of course, free wi-fi. I enjoyed ham salad, sandwiches, crisps and several glasses of wine, as we wouldn’t be getting a meal on the plane (budget airline and all that).
Eventually our flight was called and we made our way to Gate 9 to board. The aircraft was around half an hour late taking off, then we were airborne and on our way back to Blighty. At least it was only a four-hour flight this time, and not 14 hours the way it was last January when we flew back from Buenos Aires.
When we arrived it Manchester, it took absolutely ages waiting at the luggage carousel for our cases to arrive. Then it was onto the shuttle bus and back to the long-term car parking, where we picked up our Vauxhall Meriva for the drive back to Durham.
We arrived back home right on the stroke of midnight; the end of another fabulous holiday in some unusual places.
Here’s to the next time! 🙂