To get from Almería to the Faroe Islands is a relatively simple affair. You catch an elderly and slightly decrepit plane run by Primera air, and sit on the tarmac for half an hour waiting for a French Air controller to get off his fat arse, all the time studying your neighbouring depressed Danish fellow passengers.
When you eventually get to BLL, an airport somewhere in Denmark whose name I never did learn, you spend some time wandering around the gleaming modern terminal.
I quickly discovered that the self checkin for Atlantic Airways was already open, meaning I didn’t have to lug the suitcase around for the six hour wait. Result. I dropped off the case and went for a wander in a nearby wood.
Bloody big ants in Denmark.
On the way back I came across this amusingly named hotel.
If BLL is anything like the rest of Denmark, I’m not sure I’d like the place. Too modern, too antiseptic, too efficient and slightly too cocky in their use of English.
Kind people however. They had built a little shelter for the plane spotters. Several Danes with cameras were sitting in there sipping coffee. Well, I assume they were spotting planes. One hears stories.
The Danes seem to have a problem in distinguishing between past and present tense in English. The Turks seem to have followed them in this habit.
Two hours late (thanks France – the lazy bastards were disrupting flights across Europe again) the gleaming modern Atlantic Airways flight finally took off for the North Atlantic.
Skimming past the Orkneys, the plane made good progress. The Boeing had map flights screens showing our progress in real time. It also had a very good interactive in flight entertainment system you could connect to on your tablet.
And suddenly there we were. One second nothing but the Atlantic, then you whip over a towering peak and find yourself skimming past high bird cliffs as the plane veered round to land at Vagar Airport.
The Atlantic planes are supposed to have special boosters to use the Vagar runway, which is perilously short. As we hammered in and hit the runway, it certainly felt as if the brakes were working.
From there, in the gloom that is the late May midnight up here, it was a short walk to the nearby airport hotel.
I eventually found somebody setting up the breakfast tables who kindly lent me a key to a room. Sparse but clean and comfortable.
And so ended day one.