Office lunches: One day soon, instead of just shopping or going for a drink in the pub we are going to have a proper picnic lunch in a local park. We need plan this because we'll be needing chilled wine and proper food to make it really enjoyable.

More about Mallorca: I'd rather be there still, than back at work.

More about Mallorca: On Tuesday we braved the local busses. Not much to brave really, since the bus route went right by the hotel, and in fact there was a stop for the hotel itself. The service was frequent provided you wanted to travel along the coast and maybe two busses a day if you didn't - we wanted to travel along the coast. For ~70p we got a 55 minute bus trip to the little town of Puerto Pollensa (not to be conused with Pollensa which isn't so close to the coast and therefore doesn't have a Puerto (port)). The place seemed full of semi-retirees enjoying the good weather, strolling along the promenade and generally looking after their arthritis. At the other extreme there were a few families with pre-school kids who spent all their time either in the sea or building sand castles. After exploring we just settled into some comfy chairs in a cafe and watched the world go by/read our books/wrote postcards/ate a light lunch and drank plenty. After that it was siesta time so it was back on the bus all the way to the hotel.

More about Mallorca: We did a lot of lying on the beach and beside the pool. The pool had a bar service, the beach didn't. Nuff said.

More about Mallorca: The first proper morning S and I spent walking along the beech to the nearest town - Can Picafort. The hotel was right on the beach (which was apparently 5 miles long, although we didn't explore it end to end so couldn't really confirm that) and it was great to be strolling long a sandy beach with bare feet and playing in the shallows - a far cry from the usual way we spend Monday mornings. Can Picafort was definitely a German enclave - and we were already getting quite used to the sound of German (The default language spoken by the local hotel staff to their guests was nearly always German which we found amusing.) The cafes and restaurants were all offering "Kaffe and Kuchen", and other Germanic delights...

More about Mallorca: The first day we did little other than explore the hotel and all its facilities and sleep. We both fell asleep for 3 hours in the afternoon - a luxury not usually possible at home. Mind you we don't make a habit of setting the alarm clock for 04:30am on Sunday's so that might have had something to do with our tiredness.

Dinner in the hotel, whilst only a buffet, was of a very high standard and there was plenty of it. Five courses were quite posisble, but we didn't indulge to that degree every night.

Time to actually write something about last week's little trip. Just as the sun was brightening the sky on the Sunday before last (I wish there was a way of manually editing posting dates on Blogger entries) a taxi pulled up outside the house and loaded up our two suitcases, one parasol, S and myself. We were off on our travels again, at last! Mallorca here we came. Check-in a BHX went smoothly and flight BY406A was soon in the air. Two hours and six minutes later it touched down in PMI (which despite the write up at that link was pretty much like any other airport in the world and we just drifted though and out the other end into a waiting taxi. Ah... what luxury. No grotty transfer bus for us this year! Travel in style - pay a bit more, mind you, but it felt oh so worth it. We arrived at the hotel just before lunch and whilst the hotel staff transported our luggage to our room we set filled in the paperwork and drank freshly squeeze orange juice which magically appeared from somewhere.

In my e-mail box today was a mail from another member of staff worried that she might have been party to a viral e-mail. It's subject line was "DO NOT OPEN MAIL FROM ME"... Why does this remind of me of a sticker once seen on the bottom of a box of fragile patisserie: "DO NOT TURN UPSIDE DOWN"?

Back from hols now.