Our flight left Luton around 9:25am, after a small delay for the cases to be loaded. After a bumpy start, with a little turbulence as we flew through the cloud covering Bedfordshire we had a smooth flight over the Pyrenees to Palma in Mallorca. And by 1:30pm we were on the included shuttle bus to our resport, all praying we’d make it to the hotel before they wrapped up the lunch service.

Fortunately, we were in luck and squeezed into the dining room with 35 minute to go. The hotel provides a really great salad bar with one side offering bowls of single items, e.g. grated carrot, grated beetroot, puy lentils, chickpeas and the usual suspects (lettuce, tomato, cucumber).

The other side os compound salads like colesloaw, pasta salad or cucumber, mango and spring onion salad. Then there’s a hot counter set in a horseshoe opposite the salad bar, offering pizza, pasta, grilled meat or fish, vegetarian and paella, in four separe stations. Lastly, the sweet counter with tiny individual plates of sweet treats. If you think of it like a sweet tapas bar, you would be far away.

Lunch done, we popped upstairs to transfer Tim and Charlotte’s cases from our room into their room and put on our shorts. And to answer the question you’re pondering, dear reader, they were in our room because time was short and we’d been checked in first. While T&C were checking in, we shunted all the cases into our room, to reduce the time taken to get check in, and into the dining room.

That done, we had a quick look around the hotel and then settled on what’s become our fav table in the shade beside the poolbar. It didn’t take Char too long to down a cappuccino and move onto a lager. Liz and Tim were all in on the Pepsi Max and your scribe started out on the St Clements and moved onto the Sangria and then the cocktails (yummy).

Given that lunch had been late, the afternoon seemed to whizz past and before we knew it the pool bar was closing and it was 6pm. We popped back to the room, put on long trousers and headed down to the lounge bar for pre dinner drinks.

Evening food was a theme on lunch but with more expensive things on the hot counters. A similar layout for the salad bar and sweet counters was in place for lunch and dinner. The only difference being the compouns salads and choice of sweet items were different.

After we’d eaten our fill and consumed enough drinks to sink several small battleships we retired to the loungebar for a couple more drinks. And what do you think I spotted in the corner of the entertainment area, around the corner from the lounge bar? An upright piano! I checked if it was locked and was delighted to discover it wasn’t.  We sat for a while, but decided to head up to our rooms just after 9pm – goodnight!