Day 10

Sunday 19th February: We had to vacate our cabin by 9:00am. We put last minute toiletries etc into our travel bags as the cases had gone. As we didn't disembark until 12:00 we had a leisurely breakfast at the Villa Verde and made sure we had plenty to eat as we didn't know what time we'd get a proper meal again! We took Charlie to the kid's club so he wouldn't be bored and had a look around the ship's shops with Courtney. We'd looked in a couple whilst on board but not really bothered much about them. We found the 'logo' shop and treated Charlie and Courtney. We had to go to reception to sign for our on board purchases and then collected Charlie. Our meeting point for disembarking was the 'La Piazzetta' lounge on deck 6. We like this lounge and had a last minute treat in there before we left! A lady came along with a card marked 'red,' our did disembarkation colour and we followed her to the exit. They scanned our cards one last time and we left the ship.
We thought it would be a bit chaotic at the port side as it was in Genoa but it was fine. We collected our luggage from the conveyor belt and made our way outside the terminal. There was only a short queue for a taxi, the police were there directing people to taxis and we had one within a couple of minutes! It took us to the Estacio del Nord bus station. We had a 45 minute wait for the 2:00pm bus to take us to Girona airport. There was no hurry though as we didn't fly until 7:30. It was about an hours bus ride and surprisingly had free wi-fi on board!
Although you can't normally check your luggage in until 2 hours before the flight they did let us check them in. That made life a lot easier! We went through security and had a look around the duty free shops. There wasn't much choice of eating places at the airport, just 2, so we ended up at McDonalds. After a little wait we were ready to board our plane, as it turned out today wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be but I knew it was going too well! We boarded the plane and sat waiting just like we had in Manchester, not a good sign! It finally came over the tannoy that a bird had been sucked into the engine whilst landing and they had to wait for an engineer to come and inspect the plane before we were able to take off! Deja vu! Unbelievable! Every so often a tannoy announcement would be made that the engineer was on his way! We finally set off an hour and 10 minutes late!