Naples; Wednesday, 19 February, 2020

I’d worked from home in the morning as I’d booked the afternoon off as leave, so as soon as lunchtime arrived, I was able to log off and head down to Gatwick.

I had a quick and smooth journey through the airport, which was surprisingly quiet – especially as it was the Wednesday of the school half term holidays.

The gate was shown at the exact time that had been predicted ever since I’d arrived at the airport and was on a gate really close to the departures lounge, so very quickly we had a full gate and then a fully loaded flight.

There was a little bit of a wait to get the last of the luggage on, but we eventually pushed back on time, and had a direct run from the stand to the threshold of the runway almost directly behind us, and with nothing else waiting to take off or to land, we were soon airborne. I think less than 5 minutes from push back to airborne at Gatwick is about as fast as it’s possible to do it.

A generally smooth flight over and we touched down in Naples just as the last of the days light was starting to fade. There are no jet bridges at Naples airport, but we were parked right by the entrance to the immigration desks so we were able to just disembark via steps and walk into the building. There we were met by soldiers in full protective gear taking the temperatures of each passenger – clearly wanting to avoid any cases of Corona Virus making it through the airport.

There was also a lady from immigration clearly instructing UK passengers to use the EU channels for immigration, to speed the process up. Once through and with my bags round only a few minutes later I headed out of the airport and made it to the airport bus stop as the next shuttle was loading up, so I was able to quickly make the connection into town.

The bus dropped me off at the central station, from where it was a good 15-minute walk to the hotel.

By the time I finally got to the hotel and got checked in it was starting to get late, so I just headed down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, and then a quick nightcap in the bar before turning in for the evening.