Day One - Brisbane to Isle of Wight - 3 April, 2012

After thirty-eight hours since leaving our home we arrived at our accommodation, St Leonard’s Hotel, Shanklin, Isle of Wight on a wonderfully sunny and cool afternoon. Needless to say we were pleased to have arrived as we felt rather shattered and looked much the same. Our flight over with Etihad was very good with the only snag being Customs at Heathrow Airport on our arrival at seven fifteen in the morning. The service was unbelievably bad with a ratio of one customs officer to every hundred passengers. There were three hundred of us in the queue. At one stage there were no officers behind any of the desks then one sauntered back in, slowly logged onto his machine followed by two others. It took us one and a half hours to reach the customs desk and we were halfway in the queue so many waited far longer than us. Whilst Henk and I waited we worked on a check list of how to prepare for British Customs e.g. bring a book, wear comfortable shoes, bring a sense of humour, lower your expectations etc. There was no apology for the delay. It does not bode well for the London Olympics. By coincidence in the Letters to the Editor in today’s “The Times” was a letter describing the bad service under the title “Hissy Fit”. It told how the passengers waited for half an hour and when the officers finally sauntered in with lunch boxes under their arms there was a round of spontaneous applause. Apparently two of the three officers turned on their heels and left the hall in high dungeon. We were left wondering if there was a deliberate “go slow” because of the letter. We decided to clear out of Heathrow as quickly as possible to make up for lost time as we needed to catch three different trains from Heathrow to get to Plymouth Harbour. We went to Paddington Station then changed to the Underground to go to Waterloo Station and then from Waterloo to Plymouth Harbour to catch the ferry to Isle of Wight. In the middle of all this we wanted to get a UK sim card for one of our mobiles. We did this at Paddington Station with very efficient service from Vodafone and would highly recommend they take over the customs service! We were lucky all the way with the train connections and made good time to Plymouth Harbour. We arrived at the ferry terminal two hours early at twelve fifteen. They weren’t concerned that our tickets were for two fifteen and let us onboard. It only took twenty minutes from Plymouth Harbour to reach Ryde so the island lived up to its logo “No island comes this close”.

We caught the twenty minute Island Line train from Ryde Pier to Shanklin where we will be staying for four nights before we move onto the Channel Islands. Our accommodation is an 1870’s three storey Victorian house which was converted into a hotel/B&B in the 1930s. It is well positioned as it is close to the main street of Shanklin, the cliffs and the beach.

Our first job was to find an outdoors shop to replace my fibre pile jacket I left in the lounge room at home. I remembered it half way to the airport! It was the only jacket I was bringing and as it is still cool during the day and chilly at nights I needed to get one asap. There was only one outdoors shop in the small town of Shanklin and only one fibre pile jacket that fitted me. Unfortunately it is a dreadful khaki colour but beggars can’t be choosers and it‘s very warm! We walked along the main street of Shanklin and headed to the high cliffs overlooking the channel and beaches. The views were spectacular. It was an early night for us. Tomorrow we start some serious exploring of the island.

Photos: The Island Line Train on the Ryde Pier; St Leonard's Hotel, Shanklin; Preparing for our first swim.