Day 1 – Cardiff to Sao Miguel, the Azores
Set out from Cardiff in good time. Avis was asked to provide a big car…….they obviously interpreted this as meaning engine size as the plush BMW they provided had such a small boot that we ended up with suitcases on the back seat and on our laps. But we arrived in Gatwick in good time only to find the flight delayed 7 hours due to a tropical storm…..but on the bright side SATA, the Azorian airline, delivered on its promise to provide us with extra baggage allowance and the technical kit was labelled fragile and caused no problems. The only amusement came from Mark`s XRF `gun` which was seen on the security scanner and it took us some time for us to explain its exact us…..they explained any thing that even looks like a gun can make the airlines jumpy….not surprising really!!
The airline did provide us with meal vouchers which we used to have a couple of nice meals on cafe rouge…..Pete picked low Cal options….must be taking the diet seriously. Great afternoon talking science and thanks to Dan we now have the blog setup. Goz frighten us by sending us this link…..yesterday’s flooding in the Azores. Mike is going viva Lisbon and should now arrive 2 hours before us….thank goodness for Luis being at the other end….well more when we get there.
We eventually boarded the out-bound flight at 21.20…..7 hours late. The stress of sitting down all day and talking sceince caught up with some of us with John, Mark and Marta all sleeping most of the way. To be honest this was probably help by the SATA plan being very comitable. They showed the movie the ‘Big Year’ which I thourght was a bit ironic as the average age of the plan was >60 and I am sure most poeple were birders or ramblers. So we arrived last night to be greeted by Luis and Amindo, what a star to stay us past midnight to welcome us. We rented a nearly new red micra, which sounds like a sowing machine but has a surprisingly large boot, and since I seem to be the only one awake I followed Luis’s van (yes he has a van !! – its for diving and worm collecting) to the apparments in the Centre of Ponta Delgarda. Mike had already arrived and was sound asleep but the appartment staff were still there cleaning the rooms….at these were not rooms but whole appartments!! We started off all filing
into one when Luis informed us that we had the whole floor and an apparment each. Each unit has a dinner/kitchen, a master bedroom and a bathroom and we have secured an extra ’empty’ one as a communial kitchen….they are lovely. I think we have a special deal arranged by Luis between long term local lets and summer lets. Took me a little time to plug in all the gadgets for charging but soon I was out cold.
Slept Ok and woke up to fantastic bird song, open the window not to floods or the expected rain but sunshine. will post a picture later.
