Malta - our arrival

Hello there,  have you missed me at all? Noticed that I've been absent for a while? Well, a whole week to be exact. I've been in Malta for a week away with the Hubster to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

We got married on New Year's Eve 2005 and try to get away each year to celebrate it together (awww, how romantic) :)

We were planning on Egypt, but that was a no-go due to the issues going on there at the moment - we could have gone to one of the resorts, but thats not really our thing and we really wanted to return to Cairo where we had our honeymoon. So a back up plan was needed. What we had to try hard not to do was to book Marrakech - it is our most favourite place to be but we've been there 4 successive times now so we really needed a change.

Time was not on our side either, we had originally planned a 2 week trip & had given ourselves a 3 week slot to do it in, but Hubster started a new job and we ended up with a tight week with no real room for movement, otherwise The Gambia was next on our list. 

So this left us with little choice but to see what was flying out on the day we needed and book it. It ended up being Malta. Neither of us had been before and the temperature was to be a nice warm 16 degrees, so we booked that.

You know when things start off on the wrong foot then just get worse?  Well, that's what happened on our arrival to Malta.

The flight and everything was fine, but when we touched down it was raining - apparently they don't get that much rain, and this was RAIN!  It was rain that Cumbria would have been proud of - there is a reason why Cumbria is so green you know, it's all the rain!

Still, we smiled and made our way through the airport looking for our private transfer driver. No one with our name on a little card, we looked and looked, unsure what to do, when a friendly tour guide pointed us to a window where we could check. No booking for a driver for us, and no Internet so I could check my receipt, we had all the print outs but nothing was on it about a transfer yet I'd checked & double checked everything at the time.

A taxi it was, €25 + tip. It will be sorted when we get home, keep smiling.

Nice looking hotel, Trip Advisor says the rooms are huge & roomy - dunno what happened to ours then. It's tiny and no room to put our suitcases down. Can't unpack them as there's is no cupboard space, just half a dozen coat hangers. Still, not bothered, will happily live out of a suitcase laying on the floor. Keep smiling.

Oh no, puddles on the floor, the balcony door leaks and the rain has come in and soaked the tiled floor, it's not going away as its tiled so we just try and avoid that area. Keep smiling.

The room is FREEZING due to the drop in temperature. Try the heater, but it doesn't work, it's blowing out cold air, we are sitting in our coats (well I am, he didn't bring his and mine was last minute as I'd forgotten my fleece). The smile is fading.

The double room is two twins pushed together, suspected that might be so, but of course they're made up a single beds so no snuggling to keep warm. Besides there's a thin see-through sheet straight onto the mattress (too scared to look to see if mattress is clean) and another thin sheet on top, with a bed runner that's only about 12" wide. But it's ok, in the bottom of the wardrobe there are two blankets, like something you would get in wartime, brown, thin & scratchy. So scratchy you can feel the roughness through the thin sheet. They are really not going to be warm enough so we trot down to reception to ask for some more. No more, hotel fully booked, sorry.

What about the heating? It will come on at 9.00pm. Smile, Sue, smile!

We decide to find food, stupidly forgetting that it's NYE and not a lot might be available, the hotel has a NYE dinner on with entertainment (a chap on a keyboard singing in a Vic Reeves stylee) it's €35 a head and they don't have a vegetarian option.  So the vegetarian's option is to venture out into that rain even if just to find a shop to buy a bag of crisps!

We got SOAKED! The rain was running down the streets like mini rivers. Would you believe at that last minute I threw my walking boots in my case, I wear flip-flops all year round at home yet for some reason decided to take my walking boots on holiday. Well, thank goodness I did.  We managed to find a lovely little Indian restaurant who would serve it's as long as we were out in 45 minutes. You feed us quick, we'll eat it quick. It was delicious, read my review in Trip Advisor HERE.

Back to the rain and a 25 minute walk, getting back to the hotel in a host of sodding clothing, with nowhere to hang it. Dumping it on the floor, towelling off & getting into our cold beds. We decided to see if the heating worked (heater was close to the top of the room above the door) . Put it on full blast & out came a sprinkle of ...... stuff. Tiny brown spots hit the white bed sheets then smudged into ginger streaks. Bugger it, I'm not going to reception again. Gonna have a cup of tea and........ hang on a minute, where's the tea making stuff? There's no tea making stuff? PANIC!!! No tea?

Had to go to the bar & buy a brew :( (Not smiling anymore)

During the night Hubsters blanket fell off the bed & into the puddles, got soaked through so all he had was a single, very thin, sheet. Apparently mine was tucked in tight & I wasn't sharing ;)

Things, can only get better.....

The next few posts are going to all about Malta, if your not interested in that then I'll be back to craft blogging soon with some rather exciting news.