The summation of the day is that it's time to head home from a great, if a little too hot, week in Mallorca.
With our flight not until 2.20pm, there was no rush to head off so we had a more relaxed start to the day packing up the final few bits before leaving for the airport at 10am when we had to check-out. We have really enjoyed staying in our little mountain cottage and the owner has been in regular contact to by WhatsApp to make sure that everything was to our liking. Before we left this morning we took a few photos of the outside, including the most social, and certainly vocal, of the cats that the kids named 'Chit Chat' . The other black cat who preferred to keep a more sedate profile, 'Sensei', short for sensible and a nod to the Japanese word for a teacher, kept some distance!
The journey from Fornalutx to the airport at Palma takes around 45 minutes going through the Sóller Tunnel, but as we had a couple of hours this morning we took the old road up and over the top of the Sierra de Alfàbia mountain range. Before the tunnel that was opened in 1997 this was the main route into the region and with all the hairpin bends (over 60 in total) along the Coll de Sóller, I can't begin to imagine how slow the journey would have been when the road was busy.
Today it is a popular road for cyclists and we certainly saw more cycles than cars on the drive, and we had a quick stop at the top to take in the view.
By this time we'd had an email from easyJet letting us know that our flight was delayed, but to still get to the airport on time. We had a very smooth handover of the hire car (we've loved the Ford Puma, so much more suited for the mountain roads that the Lynk & Co. 01), check-in and trip through security, giving us plenty of time for some lunch.
As I write this part of the blog, our aircraft is at 3000ft on the approach into Palma and hopefully it will have a quick turnaround and we'll be on our way back to London Luton.
The turnaround was efficient, however we then discovered from the flight deck that due to weather over the Pyrenees there would be a ground delay of a further 55 minutes, and whilst this did reduce slightly, we ended up with a late arrival of just over 2 hours by the time we landed at Luton.
So that concludes the blog for this summer, we hope that you've enjoyed reading about our holiday. For us it provides a great memory bank and we often look back over previous blogs to reminisce about certain days or trips, and the kids are now reading some of them from when they were too young to fully remember (Paloma was full of laughter reading about our day in Luxembourg and looking at pictures of her younger self).
Holiday Highlights
Paloma - Snorkeling (until stung), caves and especially the eclipse.
Forrest - Caves, eclipse and seeing the wildlife.
Amber - Eclipse, snorkeling and caves.
Matt - Eclipse, the food and getting to drive the windy mountain roads!
Blogged by Matt
