Unusually we had a plan for the whole fortnight, as I have been before I thought I knew what I was doing, but it did not start well. We were supposed to fly out on Tuesday morning but on Saturday a persistent ache in my leg got worse so I foolishly looked up potential causes on the web - Blood Clots! I called the NHS Helpline and they came to the same alarming conclusion so off to Shrewsbury to see the doctor. He got me started on blood thinners but the first slot for scanning (to confirm the problem) was not till Wednesday.
I am no medical expert but even I know a four hour flight is not a great idea for someone with a blood clot so I cancelled all the hotel, car park and car hire bookings and walked round in a bit of a hump for the next four days.
I was scanned at 1.45pm on Wednesday, no clot found (apart from me of course) and by 4pm we had booked flights for 7.30 next morning as well as all the other arrangements.
We use Booking.com for many of our holidays and I have been puzzled by their frequent offers of 'free cancellation'. Surely that is not very fair on the accommodation provider.
Last Thursday I was discussing Booking.com’s cancellation policy with Clive at the Poppy House. He said that if someone books a room with them and then cancels within three days then Booking.com still pay them the full amount as that is what is in their contract. Because they refund the customers money Booking.com will be out of pocket unless they can sell the room to someone else so they then keep reducing the price just to get some money to off set their loss. We seem to have been beneficiaries of this policy last night. The best (and therefore most expensive) hotel in Gatwick is the Sofitel so I was surprised to see a posh room on Booking.com for £93. The receptionist had no idea how much Booking.com had sold the room for, fortunately I had the booking printed out as he asked me how much he was supposed to charge me and took a copy of the booking. The room should have been £150 so Booking.com took a loss of £57 rather than the full amount and we got a very comfortable nights sleep.
Whilst the island of La Palma is not huge the roads are quite winding and indirect, it seemed on the walking holiday we did too much driving so this time we are spending the first week near the bottom where there are some good walks up some volcanos. We did have an Air BnB place booked near the top but cancelled that over the weekend so will now wait until later to sort out somewhere for the 3rd - 7th before finishing up in Santa Cruz which is the capital.
There do not seem to be many interesting places to stay in the south so we are booked into an all inclusive "Butlins". We have stayed in similar places before and so long as you just use it as a base and don't try to eat and drink as much as you can to get your moneys worth they are not too bad, lets hope this one is OK.
So that is the plan, what else could go wrong .... tune in tomorrow to find out.