Castanets and Calamari (and Traffic Rules)

They woke me up at 0415 which was just rude. But in no time I was a buzzing babbling boy once more which sort of got in the way of proceedings.

We cleared the room and repacked all the suitcases with what seemed like considerably more than we'd arrived with. The man on reception took our key cards and assured us that the main restaurant was open for breakfast. One other family loitered in the foyer, but the rest of the hotel was eerily quiet and the restaurant was closed.

We tried to jemmy the door open then I ran back to reception where he called a security guard who kicked the door in for us. We dined alone in a corner, and I explored behind the serving counter but didn't fry anything. Eventually a foreign family arrived, and, faced with 120 empty tables, took the one next to us. We got to the bus at exactly 0530, the driver waited for the stragglers in the toilet, and we sped off into the night, seeing stars through the big windows of the giant coach sent to pick all 8 of us up.

Goodbye, good old Bar Cactus, for the last time. We traversed the winding back streets of rural Mallorca and stopped here and there to pick up a few more dozy holidaymakers from far-flung hotels including some from the town we stayed in 2 years ago. We'd been on the coach for well over an hour when dawn broke, chasing the stars away forever.

At Palma airport there are always waits and delays and panics and queues so there may have been some grumpage but they didn't find any illegal items on us so I bought a duty-free plane and Lego set that was way above my budget and we'd bought unknown booze 'Soberano' last time so we bought 'Veterano' for a change and we wolfed down some chips to keep ourselves going.

We waited again for the flat buses and for a wheelchair user to be extracted from the plane with a special lifter and we flew off over the mountains only 30 minutes late, not bad for Europe. I napped over France and saw the Isle of Wight and Fawley oil refinery and Hythe pier that we walked on with Grandad and the motorway and bang! We were back in England.

Then came the great unloading and sorting and laundering, in which I helped in my own special way, I think you know what that is. In the afternoon, we all did our own thing in our own worlds of comfort, I Minecrafted, Bud ran 10 miles and Jof went to bed.

That's when we started to notice the little differences, and bizarre-osities. In Majorca they drive in the middle of the road, unless absolutely forced onto the right by oncoming traffic, roundabouts etc. But in England, they drive in traffic jams. We'd spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a holiday, but were proud to have stolen 19 little jams, 3 soaps and a packet of teabags from the hotel. I dropped some cutlery in the kitchen to make up for not having 27 Euro-kiddies doing it every 3 minutes, and when we thought 'Ooo, if we hurry we can meet Mr Melones Melones on the beach' it turned out we had to go to the Co-op for milk. We did have a decent pile of booty, though.