The first leg of our journey on Thomas Cook Airlines (one I'd never heard of before Dana found this flight) was lovely. We each watched a different film (I highly recommend The Finest Hours), tried to get a couple of hours of sleep, read, relaxed and had dinner and breakfast all within the course of an 8 hour flight. When we arrived in Manchester at 7:00 a.m. this morning, the pilot greeted us all with the news... "if you want to know the results, we're out."
Dana's seat mate was a reasonable enough seeming chap who explained to Dana earlier in the flight why he had decided to vote absentee to leave the EU. Wonder if he's experiencing the same pangs of regret so many others are today. After disembarking, making our way through customs, and storing our bags for a few hours, we made our way into the Manchester Picadilly station, which is an easy walk to all sorts of fun shopping, dining and sporting events.. Since we only had a few hours before we had to be back at the airport for our afternoon flight to Rome, we stuck to exploring the city by foot (it was a somewhat chilly 60, but it felt great when we had anticipated a hot afternoon), eating lunch at Nando's, a favorite when we're in England, and doing some browsing in stores.
By the time we returned to the airport, the news stations were in full immersion over the "Brexit," every bar in the place was filled to the brim with Brits drowning their sorrows at their plunging pound (just as they were off to leave on holiday!), or at least that was the picture I painted of the scene that greeted us in the airport. The security was the tightest I'd ever seen it, and we were curious if this is the new normal over here, or if the vote had exacerbated tensions.
Luckily, though the flight was late, it was relatively smooth, we had a lovely taxi driver who wanted to tell us so much about his fair city, all in Italian, and we tried valiantly to understand a couple of words here and there. We arrived at our lovely Sclainata di Spagna (at the top of the Spanish Steps, naturally) too late for our 8:30 dinner reservation, but with a smidge of energy left to grab a late dinner and explore our surroundings. A few hours later, the kids are asleep, and I'm wrapping up day #1.
The Piazza di Spagna, our neighborhood for the next three days, was brimming with activity - a bride and groom having their photograph taken, armed soldiers keeping watch, all manner of peddlers cramming roses in our faces at every turn. It was a festive way to end our first looong day of vacation. I have some cute photos from Manchester that I took with my iPhone, but I will have to upload those tomorrow. It is, after all, time for me to... finally... get some much needed sleep!
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