Santa Cruz de La Palma; Monday, 27 February, 2023

I needed to get the bus that left Santa Cruz at 08:45, so I had an early breakfast and had checked out of the hotel shortly after 08:30.

The bus arrived only a few minutes after leaving Santa Cruz, so I was glad I’d made sure I got to the bus stop with plenty of time to spare, and less than 10 minutes later I was in the checkin area of La Palma Airport.

Checked in all the way through to London I wandered through the very quiet security area and up into departures where I was able to grab a seat out on the terrace to catch some of the last of the warmth of the Canary Islands.

Before too long my plane was landing inbound from Madrid so I wandered back inside and made my way to the gate, where boarding was called shortly afterwards.

An uneventful flight later we landed in Madrid and I made my way through transit and over to the lounge to spend the next several hours in transit. When I’d originally booked the trip I’d only had a 2 hour connection, but a few months earlier Iberia had decided to cancel the afternoon flight and put everyone on the morning flight, taking my connection time up to six hours – not quite enough time to actually do anything in Madrid, a bit too long to spend in the lounge, but in the end that’s were I spent the time – not helped by the fact that I wasn’t feeling too great from what, at the time, I thought was a cold. In fact it turned out (when I finally managed to get home on Tuesday afternoon and test) that after having avoided it for 3 years I was unwittingly sat in the business lounge at Madrid airport shedding Covid everywhere.

Eventually boarding for my final flight back to London was called and I headed down to the gate. Of course, it’s when you’re not feeling great and you just want things to continue to run smoothly that things usually go wrong. The plane eventually pushed back 45 minutes late, for no obvious reason and was still 35 minutes late by the time we landed at Heathrow.

It looked like things were getting better as we came off the runway and almost immediately reached our gate, except we had to wait just off gate for 10 minutes before anyone turned up to guide us on, then wait another 10 minutes to get the jet bridge attached, and then once all that had been completed a 45 minute wait for the luggage. I was really quite glad that I’d booked an airport hotel for the evening rather than trying to struggle home in a cab, so half an hour later I was in bed in my hotel room leaving the issue of getting home to the following morning.