From Gatwick to Bergen - part 1

Well, after a jolly toss and turning, slightly too hot hotel bedroom stay, we're getting ready for the hotel breakfast buffet feeding frenzy in the Garden Restaurant before a jaunt across the car park to departures in Gatwick's south terminal.  Still have to pick up toothpaste and an adaptor; isn't it funny we're going on a flight that is shorter that the one I'll be taking to the Burgh in a few weeks time but still have to have all the provisions?

Last night Emma modelled the bath, as you do, I'll see if I can find that NZ equivalent pic at some point.  She's just washing her BBQ hair now so that she is fresh as a daisy for the day of exploring ahead! Oh yes, the NZ one, which has the best Rod hair?

Washed and ready to go we popped down to a slightly discombobulated Hilton breakfast buffet, only 4 types of cheese and no mushrooms and strict instructions on the toaster for sliced bread only, no breakfast muffin for me :-(. Grapefruit starter and a very sweet cranberry juice. What do they do to juice on hotel buffets, it always seems to have an extra kilo of sugar added.  Second course of toast, grapefruit juice and fizzy water, scrambled egg, tomato and hash brown and of course the pre-requisite  slice of cheese.  Satisfied yum.  Bit of a disordered breakfast restaurant, felt very sorry for the gentleman with two tiny boys having tantrums who was joined on the table next to him by a well meaning (I am sure) older lady who just kept telling him to manage his children. Wind your neck in.....oh and then someone tried to toast a croissant, honestly.....did they not follow the rules?

The other breakfast group of note were a range of Spanish teenagers - there were hundreds of them wearing t-shirts emblazoned with GENESIS.  Pretty sure that they weren't 'with' the band and might have just come back from some sort of South American pilgrimage trip of some description.  They'd stayed in Gatwick last night after flying into LHR?  Suppose we'll never know if they are die hard Phil Collins groupies.  

Express checkout, jaunt over the road to the terminal, already checked in so printed our boarding cards and sticky baggage tickets, cases gone and off to security we go.  There were hundreds of British school boys milling around with rucksacks and things, couldn't see any teachers and we didn't work out where they were going but lots of them had sun cream confiscated because it was on too big pots.  Late late ski season??? It took a bit of a a while, I had to take my shoes off and go in a special X Ray machine with my arms above my head to be told my bra was setting the alarms off.  Oo err, it is a new one from M&S.  Em's bag was taken away because she hadn't packed it properly and the X Ray machine couldn't see inside properly tee hee hee 😀

Still, we were through, water and crisp buying check, adaptor buying check.  Toilet pit stop check, call to gate already phew - off to gate 1, tiny sit down then onto the plane! We're off! Or are we? Where is the plane ?

It's all okay, special ice cream sweets from Hels and we're off!

Hope we don't need these !! Good positive message from Norwegian air though, well done