What a faf!

We had an excellent journey down to Gatwick and arrived a lot earlier than we imagined we would. Sophie was beginning to grumble about being hungry so I used the new App on my phone and found a pub about 15 minutes drive from the airport. We tried to follow the directions but got lost in Reigate so I tried again and to my amazement discovered I have some sort of SatNav on my phone! Instead of Gladys, though, we've called the new man Jeeves as he's very posh!

Jeeves took us straight to the Seven Stars near the village of Leigh and what a lovely pub it was! Very old, with low beams, stoneflagged floors and delicious smells of woodsmoke. Sophie, Keith and I had sandwiches (posh ones!) while Mikey had a chicken, ham and leek pie...! We spent a very pleasant hour having lunch despite Sophie saying she was already homesick and was missing all her friends!

When we'd finished we drove back to Gatwick easily and found the Summer Special parking without any mishaps. Within minutes we were on the bus for the North Terminal, making only one mistake by following signs for the Premier Inn which led us to more bus bays. Luckily we realised we could easily walk to the hotel so we retraced our steps and were soon checking in. This was all done with a machine, although there was a member of staff there to help, which I thought sort of defeated the idea of having less staff!

Our family room was very clean and comfortable and after dumping our luggage, Keith, Mikey and me walked back over to the airport to see where the Thomson check-in desk was. The terminal is very modern and big and we took a few wrong turns on the way to the departures hall, making me feel like I'd never travelled before!

Back at the hotel Keith had a good shave, then packed his razor into the hold luggage before we went back over to check-in properly. There was no other travellers there at all, and we found the check-in girl a bit confusing, to say the least! She asked for the zip code of our villa which we didn't have, even though I had Googled it for our Advanced Passenger Information. There was no mention of it on the Thomson details and she said that if we didn't have it, we couldn't check in...! I was just about to start an argument with her when she suddenly seemed to have found our details and issued our luggage tags. We had to then take our cases to the oversize desk but we couldn't have our boarding cards until the next morning, which was very annoying! It just means it'll delay us a little bit more, and we found the whole process very worrying...if our luggage arrives in Sanford tomorrow at the same time as us I will be amazed!

We returned to the hotel, lolled about a bit in the room for a couple of hours then went down to the bar for a drink and a meal. It was pleasantly busy and we had a lovely, relaxing dinner before going back to our room for an early night. I now just want to be sitting on that plane as it taxies down the runway tomorrow morning!