So, after 10 months planning, it’s finally here: Dad’s Taxi’s biggest ever fare!
Saturday 26th May finds eleven of us getting up ridiculously early. Taxis (real ones, not me) are booked for 0545, and by 0610 all eleven of us are at Manchester Terminal 2.
I’ve got one thing on my mind – Burger King Breakfast!
No, not really only one thing, I’ve also had a few nagging doubts about flying Monarch long-haul charter. Their customer service department didn’t help much last week when I phoned to add four vegetarian meals to the booking, and the rep I spoke to was smacking away on chewing gum all through the call, and I got the distinct impression my call was quite low in her priorities of things to do whilst at work.
Anyway, for anyone interested, Monarch have gone up in my estimation. They were without exception lovely people, and the flight was excellent. We had a couple of boo-boos: At check in we were allocated seats in rows 10 and 11, then as we were sorting out between ourselves who would sit with who, we realised that just one of our boarding cards said row 16. Doh ! We went to the Monarch information desk, and showed them what had happened, and in a few moments we were all relocated together, with the bonus of a couple of extra legroom seats. The standard seats were fine though, although none of us are descendants of The Land of the Giants, so maybe I’m not the best person to endorse the seat pitch. It was OK for us though. Later, at 38,000 feet, we reminded one of the cabin crew that we had 4 vege meals booked. Oh dear, have you? I don’t think we have any booked for you. They asked for proof, and amazingly I had decided to print the revised invoice that my gum-smacking friend had emailed me, and so they waved a magic wand or something and 3 vege meals appeared and one of my bunch had a cheese toastie off the rip-off snacks menu. All happy. We carnivores had the compulsory chicken with one bonsai-tree sprig of broccoli, that I think all airlines out of Manchester must now use. Where do they find broccoli that small? The chocolate pudding was amazing. To complete my review of MON305, I’ll mention that the in-flight movies were “We Bought A Zoo” and “Chipwrecked”, both of which I’ve watched recently at the cinema, and so my little media player came out, headphones on, and let me know when we get there kids. We landed about 30 minutes early, and I think I would say that Monarch are OK with me.
Immigration was a doddle, thumbs up to Sanford CBP.
So, having followed the thread on here about Alamo’s Save Time not working for non-US licenses, I was not optimistic about my little bar-code whisking us through the collection of the 15-seater. And I was correct. No variation of barcode scanning, credit card swiping or reservation number typing got us anywhere, so we gave up on self-serve and joined the queue. However, when the customer services desk was free I left the line and asked them if there was any reason why it hadn’t worked. What a good guy he was. He apologised, said it was their entire fault, and admitted that their machines really don’t cope well with non-US driving license numbers. He tapped away at his keyboard and we were soon trying to play 3D Tetris with 10 suitcases and 11 people.
By 4pm we were walking in the house, Butterfly Crossing at Oak Island Cove. The kids went berserk with their cameras, totally blown away by the house and the beautiful presentation.
Two hours later I might add, it was scattered with so much technology (cameras, iPads, laptops, mp3 players, kindles) it resembled a collision between Ideal Homes and a branch of PC World.
Day one ended early of course; we had a Papa John’s pizza delivery, and by 8.30pm we were falling asleep. Still, that was 21 hours after we’d got up, so fair enough.
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