Day 64: An end of a short era

Apologies for the delay in writing this final post. I think I wanted a bit of time to reflect and settle back into life a bit more back in England. Nevertheless I will combine the last full day in South America with the rather long trip back... 

For our final day in Montevideo, we wanted to gain more of a feel for the quiet capital city. The best way to do this was a tour. We decided to go with a bus tour, although this thought transpired to be slightly more difficult to implement than to merely think. We couldn't find the agency to buy the ticket from! There were limited buses running so we thought that we would buy the tickets first, then find some lunch. This of course was to Emma's distaste. She kept saying how we needed to eat and to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to basically be alive.  

After maybe half an hour of trying and failing to find said tour agency, we did give in to Emma's idea. It turned out to be an excellent idea. One last chivito and our brains clicked into focus mode. Within 2 minutes we had then found the tour agency! The bus tour was quite fun. The weather was very pleasant so we weren't as cold as we were on the Buenos Aires equivalent. The standout features of the tour were the presidential palace and the riverside beaches. The presidential palace was outstandingly big. It sat in the middle of a large network of roundabouts stand-alone. It was like a stately home in the middle of the city. The beaches contained some very inviting white sand which was very strange to see in a city - maybe mostly to English cities that are all concrete and misery. 

We finished the tour and pottered around for a while. We visited a few souvenir shops to find things to commemorate our unfortunately short time in Uruguay. By the time this was done, it still wasn't quite dinner time, but when it's not dinner time, it's always time to grab a drink. We wandered past a bar that had some football playing - perfect. It was Celtic vs Astana. We sat down and enjoyed the onslaught that Celtic provided onto Astana. Several beers later and we started talking to a solo American traveller that was sat on the table next to us. Conversation flowed between the three of us almost as much as the beer did! 

The football finished and we decided to go into the next door pub called the Shannon Irish Bar for more drinks but also food. After a cracking burger, a 3 person band walked in. They weren't too bad actually and helped our merry states in singing a few songs. It was a little bit of a struggle in waking up the following morning at 7am so we could leave for the airport at 8am. We finished packing all of our things and got in the taxi to the local airport. It was all going well - baggage check in and security, until we got informed of a delay to our journey. The delay wasn't given a number... eventually they provided us with a lunch voucher. The delay totalled 5 hours... The worst part of this long delay was the fact that we had to catch a connecting flight in Madrid that was less than 5 hours after we were originally meant to land.  

12 hours of flying later and we were in Madrid and trying to find out what our flight to England would be. We asked 10 people who all said different things! Eventually we managed to work out what was actually happening. Our flight had gone from being to Gatwick to Heathrow. Thankfully this was massively to our benefit. They gave us another lunch voucher. This one was actually quite impressive - a free 3 course meal that had the choice of steak or chicken for the main. As we got onto the plane, The end seemed in sight. All was not as it seemed however, we were sat on the plane for 2 hours as they fixed something undisclosed. This was as long as the flight! Eventually we were back in Blighty. 37 hours after leaving our flat in Montevideo. I might lay off the long haul flights for a while...