Ryanair occasionally have deals where they pay all taxes on 1 penny deals around Europe, so whenever they do this I snaffle up a few cheap deals. You have to be quick to get some of the more popular routes, but using this flight checker makes things a little simpler.

So I got my arse out of bed at 4am and drove up to Stanstead. At that time in the morning the trains weren’t running so I took the car and stuck it in medium term parking. To do this make sure that you get back within 24 hours or they’ll sting you for the extra days. Now one of the reasons I take journey’s like this is because I love flying, not because I have any special affinity with plane spotters but because it has to be one of the best things you can do for less than a quid. I mean they take you up to five miles, you get to hang out and drink coffee then you come back again with a landing to rival anything at Thorpe park. There is that whole romantic ‘age of travel’ stuff too, but I’d find it hard to justify a linen suit on the am journey to Newquay so I’ll leave it at that. It’s A LOT of fun.

But this time the plane doesn’t want to land at Newquay. We get to within 50 metres of the runway and the pilot decides he can’t see anything due to the thick dense fog rolling in from the Atlantic. This is true and it’s good that in this age of hi tech gadgetry he finds this out by giving it a go and sticking his foot on the throttle as the plane is about to dump itself on the runway. So we turn back and land on the teeny weeny runway at Bournmouth where we land with a thump because apparently the pilots prefer to do this than overshoot (I was told this by some bloke sitting next to me so don’t take his word for it). We got a bus to Newquay, we were dropped off at the airport where I made my way to the cliffs for some windswept hiking. You can see me being windswept here.

The plane managed to land for the journey back in the evening, making the only disappointment of my day out being the fact that it was virtually impossible to get a good Cornish pasty in Newquay…next stop Ireland.