Today we go home..... Or do we?!

The hotel made us breakfast early so we could be on the road by 7.30. Plenty of time to get to Sofia for our flight back.

 

About half an hour into our 2 hour journey the car started making a strange noise again. Another flat tyre, in fact it was the one we had replaced the day before!  NOT HAPPY.
Obviously we had no spare as we had used it yesterday and now that was flat too. We were only in a small village with no garage nearby. So I called the car hire company. Luckily they have trackers in the cars so they could see where we were, cause I had no idea! They said they would see what they could do and call me back. They were fairly quick to call back and say they had arranged for a recovery truck to take us to the nearest garage. But the driver didn't start until 9am and it was now about 8.15. Oh and as we didn't buy the extra insurance then we had to pay the recovery ourselves (in cash!) and pay for both tyres to be replaced.

So we waited. We watched stray dogs wander around trying to find food. We watched an elderly lady go through other people's rubbish to find metal to sell for scrap. It hard to understand how both Bulgaria and the UK are both part of the EU yet there is such a difference in the levels of poverty. But then again its difficult for many people to understand why we are choosing to move to a county which seems stuck in the 1950's.

 

Anyway moving on, the recovery driver didn't speak a word of English nor could he seem to understand Google translate. Still he was friendly and helpful. He got us to a tyre garage, like ATS, and sorted it all out for us. I tipped him about £10 which he was overjoyed about.

 

So back on the road again and we think we can just about make it to the airport on time as long as there are no hold ups but it will be with minutes to spare.

And then Matt makes a mistake. He directs me down the wrong slip road and we end up on the motorway heading away from Sofia. Sods law that the next junction is 20 minutes away so it's a detour that adds 40 mins to our journey and means we have no hope of getting our flight. Sigh.

We drive on and pull into the airport just in time to see our flight taking off. Then we had to spend 45 mins sorting out the paperwork about the car / tyre issues.

 

Finally we drag ourselves to the easyjet desk and explain we missed the flight. No worries they say, we can put you on Thursdays flight for £150 each. Bear in mind this is Tuesday. Matt is meant to be back at work Thursday morning. Matt's mum, who is baby and dog sitting is meant to be back at work on Wednesday. The flight lands in London. Then we have a 6 hour drive home. We would get home very late Thursday night, so wouldn't be able to drive Matts mum home until Friday morning (as its another 2 hour trip and we would be too knackered to do it that night) so she wouldn't be able to get to work that day either.
Hmmmm, not looking like that flight is going to work!

A quick google found us a way home the next day, via Istanbul. Another google got us booked into a hotel next to the airport for the night.

 

That evening we decided to explore some of Sofia seeing as we had ended up with an extra night there. The hotel booked us a taxi to downtown and we had a fab meal and then a wander round. We then found a taxi and returned to hotel. The taxi driver tried to charge us 8 times the price of the previous journey. Ha, I may be British but I'm not stupid! I paid what I felt was reasonable and walked away. Please go careful ….. some people are lovely, others are out to take your money.

 

Problem free flight home the next day. Normal life resumes.