Holiday Snaps: Holiday ends

July should find other places

And so the day came to pack my bags and return home after 17 days away. I cannot say July is the best time to visit Gran Canaria, it is hot, can be humid and many of the locals have gone on holiday.

I cannot say I was much enamoured by the holiday crowd either, things were strange, bizarre, incredible and quite unfunny at times nothing like the people you see in over Christmas and the New Year or in May. I had to deal with animated squeals of negrito, negrito caught between disgust, annoyance and amusement.

I have also been on the island in June, August and September, I think I like May and the turn of the year is usually running away from the cold of Northern Europe.

Almost a disconnect

My pickup arrived on time and the drive to the airport was without event, I was next in the queue and after check-in I settled in the lounge waiting for boarding.

There was a delay to boarding; it took the best part of one hour, with a stop-over in Madrid there was the risk of not making the connection to Amsterdam or having to run for the plane with the danger of my baggage following a lot longer after.

There was only 10 minutes to spare before boarding when I arrived in Madrid and I was already mentally prepared for a night at the airline’s expense in Madrid if things did not link up but the airport crew strike in France meant my connecting flight would also leave late.

Not caught speeding

The flight still took off just 5 minutes later and watching the flight tracking system on the monitor we reached the cruising height of almost 28,000ft but never made 1,000 km/hour, I had my camera ready to take the picture of that but the highest land speed we reached was 998 km/hour before we began descent and the feeling was strange to noticed the reduction in speed to just over 700 km/hour and the to think you’ll never be allowed to do 298 km/hour on land itself except in special circumstances or on high-speed trains.

We arrived in Amsterdam on time where it was 22° Celsius at 22:40 hours, not much different from where I had departed earlier in the day.

Truly home

My good friend came to collect me saving me the struggle of hauling my 30kg of baggage back home. Now to sort out the leakage on my boiler, holiday sometimes takes you from of thinking about these things, but for every journey away there is that home is really sweet home.

In response to the question that came on up on my Facebook page about where that home is, well, it is not in Nigeria, it is in Holland, my heart is in Europe even if my mind does do a lot of thinking about Nigeria not to say that I feel like an Englishman – there is no point pretending the association back then amounted to acceptance, we were singled out as foreigners no matter how hard we tried to adapt to being like our people.