Day 1: Home to Funchal

When I was trying to come up with places to go to celebrate my 40th birthday, I was a bit stuck for options. There aren't many places which are still warm at the end of November. Tim started looking into it and hit on the idea of the Portuguese island of Madeira, which seems to enjoy reasonably good weather all year around. While it is definitely wetter there in November than it would be during the summer, forecasts didn't seem to suggest it would be constant rain. And it definitely looked like it would be sunnier than the UK!

We ended up booking flights to Madeira from Gatwick, so we had a fairly long drive ahead of us this morning. The flight wasn't departing until 12.55, but I was a bit nervous about how much traffic we might encounter from Christmas shoppers on the way, so we ended up leaving home at around 7am. We stopped for breakfast partway down the M1 and miraculously didn't run in to any traffic jams at all, arriving at the Gatwick airport parking not long after 10am. Gatwick itself turned out to be not particularly busy on a Saturday in November, so we whizzed through security time and had plenty of time to sit and get coffee.

I think our flight would even have taken off on time if it hadn't been for one passenger who had checked in luggage but then failed to board the flight. We sat on the tarmac for a while, waiting for his bag to be offloaded. Happily, that delay was ultimately offset by a favourable tailwind, which seemed to be blowing us towards Madeira faster than we were scheduled.

The flight took under 4 hours in the end, although it felt like a long time in the slightly cramped EasyJet seats. I was sitting by a window, but didn't have a view for most of the trip as we were predominantly flying over the sea. It was only as we were about to start landing in Madeira that we got our first glimpse of the island.

It looked like it was going to be quite mountainous and have a spectacular coastline.

Unfortunately, my photos taken from the plane window are a bit wonky!

It looked like a beautiful island, though a lot more built up than the Azores.

Before long we'd landed and were queuing for passport control. By the time we'd got through that, our bags were ready to collect from the carousel and we we able to go outside and pick up our rental car. I thought we were hiring a Fiat Panda, but we've ended up with a Renault Clio which is probably slightly bigger. The hire company seemed fairly relaxed and didn't actually block a deposit on Tim's credit card, so fingers crossed it's going to be a good car rental experience!

We our staying in a hotel slightly outside of Funchal, so we had a drive of around 20km on the main road around Funchal to get to it. Once we checked in we found that we had a spacious living area...

...in addition to the bedroom.

We've also got a little balcony area from where we had a view of the sunset...

...and the sea.

Once we'd settled in and unpacked, we set out to try and find some food.

There's a nice promenade not far from the hotel which leads in to Funchal.

Luckily we didn't have to walk quite that far this evening, because we soon came across a sign for a pizzeria. It was warm enough to sit outside and eat in short sleeves; incredible, when you think that we were scraping ice off the car in Nuneaton this morning! We're looking forward to exploring more of Madeira tomorrow