Saturday, March 16, 2024

Mel left work early today at just after 6 pm for the trip to Manchester Airport, about an hour north of where we live. Our car parking reservation is for 8 pm so we needed to make sure we had enough time to stop for something to eat at the motorway service station before arriving. The car park is a short distance away from the airport on a dark, bumpy dirt road just past a series of old glasshouses crammed with traveller’s cars. The weather was not great with potholes full of brown muddy water. The car park office had an airport shuttle bus outside, so it was easy to spot, but this also caused me a bit of panic to make sure we did not miss it…when will the next one be there? I jumped out of the car but was reassured that the bus would not leave without us. Putting the luggage outside the office I moved the car to the back of the lot where it would be moved later, left my keys then we boarded the bus to the airport.

In fact, we are not travelling today. When booking the parking we realised for a small amount more we could stay overnight at a hotel a short walk from our terminal. Since the flight leaves at 8:05 tomorrow morning it would have been a difficult early morning drive from home.to park the car and still be three hours early at the airport. It made sense to take up the offer and stay at the hotel.

Of course the airport shuttle stopped at every other terminal before ours but that was alright. We are travelling light with each of us having only a rucksack and carry-on-style wheelie bag. A lot of thought has gone into this and we realised with the amount of travelling on trains and local transport in Japan it would be easiest not to have too much luggage and luggage that was easy to get through small train station gates and into overhead bins. We only have clothing for one week so we will have to do some sort of laundry half way through our trip even if it is washing in a hotel sink and hanging it up around our room. We plan on checking in our two wheelies so all we will be carrying on board will be our rucksacks which are empty save for reading material, charging cables, an iPad and noise cancellation headphones.

There are two budget hotels at terminal 2: A “Premier Inn” which I stayed at a few months ago when my flight to Warsaw was cancelled and behind it an “Ibis Budget”. It was only a short walk past a car park and across a road to the hotel. Most people do not arrive this way as we made our way awkwardly around the cars filling the car park to the busy hotel lobby to check in. Quite funky looking place with a bar off to the right and copious amounts of seating everywhere. We quickly checked in and made our way up to our basic, but comfortable room.

The hotel television was not working which is probably just as well as we need to drop our bags at check-in tomorrow morning at 5:00 am. Given that we leave from terminal 1 and we are staying just outside terminal 2 it means quite a long walk tomorrow morning along an overhead pedestrian walkway first to the central bus and train transportation hub then onto terminal 1. Even though as the crow flies, it is only a short distance, because we have to follow these walkways it will be considerably longer. Perhaps the exercise will help to wake us up.

>> Next: Day 2