We left on the Tuesday morning very early! It was actually the middle of the night (3.45am to be exact!) when we left the house, as our flight from Liverpool Airport was at 6.15am. It was very cold at this time, I had to scrape some frost off the windscreen. The good thing about this time of the morning was the roads were very empty, so there was no danger of any traffic-jams.

Arriving at the airport at about 4.30am, we parked the car in the Long-Stay car park, which I’d pre-booked as it was a great deal cheaper. This is well worth doing as it was so much cheaper than booking a taxi for the two journeys, to and from the airport.

We walked to the Easyjet check-in desks, with Ellie pulling along her little suitcase – she looked so cute. At the check-in desk, we had a little scare as I put the suitcase on to the scales, at first it measured over the 20kg limit, but thankfully settled down 200g under the limit. Phew!

Once checked in we made our way through the Customs control, where we had to remove our shoes etc, Ellie included, and she wasn’t too happy about this and to make it worse, Bear, had to be put through the X-ray machine too. After getting through the control point we headed towards the gate, stopping on the way to grab some food. Standing by the windows, Ellie was able to see all of the aeroplanes standing on the tarmac.

It was not long before we were all called forward to the gate, and the three of us were in the first group of people to get on to the plane, courtesy of Ellie being so young. At this point Ellie was quite excited, she could see the bus that would take us to the plane. She was doing so well at this point, having been awake since we’d left the house.

Having boarded the bus, we were driven across the tarmac to the waiting plane. All the way to the plane we had Ellie shouting “oh airplane, oh airplane” pointing at various planes. We boarded the plane and settled down into our seats. Ellie was really good, taking everything in, and letting us put her seatbelt on. Once everyone was on board, the plane was ready to taxi to the runway. As the plane began backing up, Ellie began to look round, wondering what was going on. She didn’t seem scared, but she knew something was happening.

The plane didn’t take long to taxi to the runway, and as soon as we were on it, the pilot increased the engines and the plane accelerated down the runway. Gemma and I were half expecting Ellie to be a little scared at this point, but she was really good. Then as the plane lifted off the ground there was a definite look of “What the heck’s going on?”

Soon we were free to move about the cabin, so we got Ellie’s DVD player out that we’d borrowed off Uncle Craig, and set about watching “Fireman Sam”, her favourite. She didn’t last too long as she fell asleep on Gemma, and who can blame her having been up since about 3.30am!

It was a pretty uneventful flight, and after about 2hr 45min we touched down, about 15mins early. We were now in Portugal! Only thing we had to do now was queue through passport control and find our bags.

To Driving in Portugal>>>>>