And so the last day of the holiday dawned. Our coach was due to pick us up at noon, which gave us time to pack and to have a last coffee with our friends.
We ended up waiting 25 minutes for the coach, as they said to be ready 10 minutes in advance, and the coach was 15 minutes late, apparently looking for a couple who had decided to take a taxi to the airport and hadn't bothered to say so.
The so-called "priority booking" channel took ages, but at least they didn't print our boarding-passes again, deeming the ones on my phone were enough. Security was very quick - I had put all my liquids in a plastic bag, but didn't have time to get them out of my rucksack, and they didn't ask me to!
We boarded the plane 15 minutes late. Not bad. But then we sat, and sat, and sat, and the Captain came on the PA to say he was very sorry but one of the computers was down and he'd sent for the engineer to come and fix it. But when that happened, the other computer went down.... at which point, they said we could get off the plane if we would like, and go back to the terminal, which many people did - the seats there were more comfortable and we could buy sandwiches. I must shout out the staff in the café - they must have hoped their working day was almost over, but instead they stayed on and made sandwiches for everybody as fast as they could Very impressive!
Finally, we were called back on to the plane (loud cheers), and eventually it actually moved (even more cheers). After that, it was straightforward - we arrived at Gatwick at about 9:30 pm local time, and there was the usual lengthy queue for passport control. But they have now made this automatic - you put your passport down on the scanner, and look at the screen, and they match them up and you walk straight through. We waited 10 minutes for a train to Clapham Junction, and then ordered an Uber to take us home, and were home almost exactly 2 hours after arriving at Gatwick. We did a minimum of unpacking, and flopped into bed, exhausted!
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