We were awake at 645, 15 minutes before the alarm was due to go off. As you do….. Coffee…. few puzzles and online newspaper reading…. Up and put the last things into the suitcases. We’d had an email from BA to say that the flight was full so they’d like us to check our cabin bags. Well…. no problem as we already had 1 big suitcase to check. It meant that we had 2 x 23kg bags in the hold so no worries at all about baggage weight.
We drove off from the Marriott into the glorious bright sunlight of the Costa Del Sol day at 8am. Our flight was at 1210, the journey should take us 70 minutes so we’d arrive at 0910 so that we had the full 3 hours for check in and security.
The journey was smooth being early and a Sunday. The dreaded A7 was pretty quiet although there were a few maniacs about who believed they were driving an F1 circuit. We needed to put a very small amount of petrol into the car near the airport so that we were dropping it off totally full. We picked out a petrol station really close to Malaga airport and then went a bit wrong, missed a turn, and ended up whirling around the many clover leafs and side roads and back roads and whatever till we got back on track and found it again. Consequently, we dropped the car off at 0920 and walked across the road to the departure terminal.
As on Friday when we dropped Lucy off, although BA was advertising 3 check in desks, only 2 were in operation despite it being a full flight, and one of them was purely for Club Europe and upper levels of the BA Exec. Club. So the line for just regular economy was quite long. Albeit it moved fairly swiftly and I suppose it took us 40 minutes to check in. We then had to pass through the security check which also went quite quickly despite Malaga not having the latest scanners as per the UK ie the ones that don’t need you to take everything out of your bag and not have containers of liquid more than 100ml.
We were then airside and stopped off for a snack. Our flight was gated at 1100 so we walked down to it and then found the lines for passport control, it being necessary to be checked out of Spain, unlike the UK. There were 3 lines. The shortest which was a non-line was for EU passport holders who merely walked through. The longest was for 3rd party countries ie UK, USA etc who had not already given fingerprints and biometrics. It was long. The middle line was for Third Party country citizens who had already given their biometric details eg us. We were waved straight through to the e-passport gates. We presented our passports and were through within about 20 seconds. Lesson to be learned. If you are leaving the EU without having given them your biometrics, allow a long time to get through this point, much longer than the short amount of time between called to the gate and the flight. You will probably miss your flight if you do that.
Once through, it was all smooth and as normal. Our flight was on time and we arrived back at Gatwick nearly 30 minutes early landing around 2pm. All ok there, picked up our car and we were home by 4ish.
It’s been a lovely week. The weather came back with us and it was sunny and 17C in Gatwick.