After I had been told this was the last trip I could take abroad, since my stupid dementia diagnostic, or that sort of thing, I decided it needed sorting out as me and Andrew had been discussing this for years. I was pleased to say that my son, Adam, had decided to come out with us so that I wouldn’t get robbed by dodgy traders along the way and to make sure I never got lost 🙂
From Adam’s point of view, it was a job that needed doing, if he wanted me to get back in one piece. I do know that he did a lot of searching around, using a lot of links me and Andrew gave him, and he came up with a pretty good solution of the main defences for the whole concept of the “Lines of Torres Verde”. Of course all his research meant little to me as I wanted to see as much as I could about Wellesley’s history in Portugal. This did lead to a few conflicts between us but, I have to admit that Adam sorted it all out for us and found a superb villa rental for us. What was more of a relief for Adam was the fact he got his sister Emma and my wife Annette along for the holiday.
I cannot remember much about the trip out to Lisbon other than it started at some unearthly hour in the morning and we were limited to one suitcase between two people. I do know that we were booked there and back on EasyJet, but that at least meant we would not be using Ryanair. Andrew Morris turned up at our house with the best taxi we could get to fit us all in and we were quickly all loaded and ready to go. We had a pleasant enough journey to the airport, and the van was very comfortable, and he dropped us off in time for the early flight out to Lisbon to start our journey.
Birmingham was as is usually expected; a long walk along to the flight desks, which already was slowing Annette down ( she needs her left knee replacing), but we made our way to the desk and boarded the plane ready for our take off. At least she was picked out by some workers for a quick shunt to the front of the queue – which helped us get through a little quicker.
We then had a tremendous plod through all the “duty free” shops, but we made it and got us a place at Weatherspoons’ for breakfast. Annette wasn’t very hungry but she had some coffee while the rest of us scoffed our food. Andrew went off to find the bogs before we continued but, as it wasn’t yet ‘daylight’ he had a good hike before he found the toilets that were open.
So with a considerable amount of time before our flight was due to take off we plodded through the terminus to catch the plane. It was a good job that we did because our flight was just about ready for loading passengers for the flight. I managed to go the the bog and we went through the check in desk, Annette was put in a lift, and had a quick walk across to the aircraft.
Considering it was an early flight and the end of the week it was pretty busy, but, we all got on board safely ready for take off. Me and Andrew were in the outside seats to some bloke on his holidays but, it was no real difficulty for the journey – what was a delay was the fact that they had at least three more aircraft take off in front of us, but we managed to fly away on our journey. Andrew was reading his newspaper while I listened to my music charts on the way there. I managed (I think) to stay awake most of the way there and we had a nice pleasant bumpy landing at Lisbon. We were safely in Portugal 🙂