Day 15, Last sun before flight home

Down to breakfast pretty early after a bit more packing, so we could get out on the pool terrace to catch our last Grecian rays of sunshine for a couple of hours.

Just before eleven o'clock we forced ourselves to leave the terrace and trudged our way back to the room to shower, get dressed for travelling and finish the last bits of packing before making our way down to the bus stop by twelve o'clock.

Mission accomplished, bus stop reached with minutes to

spare. But the bus is late, and it turns out that a minibus was used and they were waiting for us at the hotel, a tad annoying after walking all that way in the relentless sunshine. Not overly impressed with Thomas Cook, might not be using them again any time soon!

All turned out well in the end, after a couple more pick ups we were being dropped off at the airport and queuing at the booking desk. But it moved along pretty smoothly, and after having to drop our own cases off at the scanning thingy beside the check-in desks, we made our way up to the restaurant for a snack before going through passport control.

The flight was called on time and we were all shuttled over to our very new Airbus A321 and loaded up efficiently. But there

was a slight hitch, and any of you that have visited Skiathos before may have also encountered this. It is a very short runway here with the Aegean at both ends of it, this means that it's a bit of an art getting the planes off the ground here. We apparently had a head wind today so this meant we had two choices; load all the luggage and not be able to load sufficient fuel to make it to Gatwick or leave some of the luggage behind and load more fuel. So the only option was, of course, to load the luggage and then have to stop off at Kevalla some 111 miles away on the Greece mainland to take on the extra fuel to complete our flight... different...!!!

All that went according to plan and was carried out slightly quicker than the pilot suggested and we were soon up in the clouds again and heading for Blighty.