It's a long way.....

.....from Orkney to Norfolk ~ and a marked difference in temperature, too 😬

We travelled down last Monday, with our lovely friend Phil getting up at what seemed like the crack of dawn to drive us to the airport, collecting Beverly en route.  It was a long day, with a good few hours between our arrival from Kirkwall and the onward flight to Norwich.  We deposited our suitcases in the left luggage section at Aberdeen Airport and took ourselves off into the city for a couple of hours to kill some time.  The flights themselves were quite short, to be fair, but it was the hours between the two that was a tad mind-numbing and tiring 😖

The heat hit us when we stepped off the plane at Norwich Airport, with the temperature well over 10℃ higher than when we had left Kirkwall earlier that morning 😧  Thankfully we haven't been hit with the heatwaves that England has seen in recent weeks, so it came as something of a shock to our systems to find ourselves in temperatures so much higher than we'd had up here!  We had booked a minibus to collect us from the airport to drive us to the Potters Resort at Hopton-on-Sea, where we were staying to celebrate Dad's 90th birthday, and it was waiting for us when we arrived.

Dad, Amanda and Liz, and Adrian and I all had penthouse suites, whilst Sam and Beverly had deluxe rooms.  The suites in particular were very nice but all the accommodation was extremely hot, despite having balconies with patio doors.  Personally I think that Potters could do with installing air-conditioning in the penthouse suites at least, as they were up on the top floor of the hotel and the difference in temperature on the different floors was quite extreme!

The resort is ideal for families as virtually everything is inclusive, but with it being August there were of course an awful lot of children running about.  To be honest, it's not somewhere that Adrian and I would have chosen to stay had we been just going on holiday ourselves, but it was a good choice for us as a family group.  The main thing was that Dad had a lovely birthday, and was very happy to have us all together on his special day 😊

Dad's birthday was on Thursday, so the table was decorated all day 😊

Birthday breakfast...

the "birthday boy" opening his gifts...

and the birthday cake 😋

And finally, a little photo of Beverly and I sitting in the shade near the prosecco bar ~ you can see how hot I look 😄