John Edward Cooper’s Notes

Day 8
Your tour manager will advise the departure time to Funchal airport, to take the return flight. The transfer to the airport is around 30 minutes.

When Janet sets the alarm clock, she does so for it to sound ¼-hour before she intends to get up. There’d been some indecision about the margin of time we’d need between getting up and boarding the coach to the airport (8.30am), allowing for some final packing, breakfast, etc.: whether 5.30am, to get up at 5.45am; or 5.15am, to get up at 5.30am. Eventually, the former times were reinstated. I woke up, and went to the loo, ca.1.05am; and I went again at 4.50am. The latter was too close to getting-up time to allow relaxation leading to sleep. Just as well: when I checked the time it was 5.31am; therefore I woke Janet. In the toing and froing of setting times, she must have inadvertently turned off the alarm. “We washed and dressed, etc., then finished packing,” Janet wrote.


Monday 26 September 2022 07:18:30
View from the balcony, pre-dawn


Monday 26 September 2022 07:19:00
View from the balcony, pre-dawn

“Then we went for breakfast. We ‘finished off’ in our room, checked out, and were off in the coach just after 8.30am. I’d asked Michele about extra leg-room, and she said she’d find out at the airport.” We’d asked Riviera to book seats with extra leg-room for us on the flights, but on 25 August 2022 they’d called to tell us that although extra-legroom seats had been booked on the outward flight, there hadn’t been any available for the return flight. “It was very windy again, and sunny: certainly not cold,” Janet continued. “It didn’t take long to get through check-in. Michele asked about extra leg-room seats and we were given them. Good! We got a drink, waited for information, then headed off for Passport Control and our boarding gate. We bought two bottles of water and a couple of buns — seeded, brown, with processed cheese, tomato and lettuce.” We joined the Gate 16 queue at 10.45am, a little after it had started forming. We were supposed to start boarding at “10:50”; but the wheelchair users weren’t dealt with till 11.05am; and the rest started moving from 11.10am to board the shuttle bus.


Janet and I were in extra-legroom seats 12B and 12C, shown in green (i.e. “good seats”) on this SeatGuru Boeing 757-200 seat-plan.

One of the cabin crew came down the aisle spraying an aerosol to avoid exporting a particularly nasty Madeiran mosquito. Perhaps that was what I’d experienced in the early hours of Thursday. Taxiing started ca.12 o’clock; then there was a long wait, before it resumed at 12.11pm; and take-off was ca.12.15pm, so ca.40 minutes late. About the baguette, Janet wrote, evidently while the aircraft was pitching and rolling: “I was pleased to discover when I ate mine that there was no ‘spread’ — we have turbulence and it is difficult to write!” We landed at 16:11, so still ca.40 minutes late. The airbridge was connected at 16:23. We were through Passport Control and on our way to Baggage Claim at 16:36. When we had our cases and were about to go through the sliding glass doors of “Nothing to Declare” Customs, I sent G— B— a message:

Sent: 26-Sep-22 16:50
Just picked up our baggage and heading through customs towards the exit.

But it wasn’t necessary, because he was standing just outside the glass exit door. “It was sunny and started raining. It was cold,” Janet wrote. We arrived home at 7.20pm. “It was almost dark.”…

[2022]