The Mis-adventures are off to an epic start!

 Let me say, 21 hours in a plane is not a pleasant thing to do.

Our first leg was 14 hours and we landed in Dubai long enough to get from arrivals to departures, buy a coffee and then 'boarding' was announced.

We'd both slept probably about 2 hours and that was about as much as we ended up getting in total.

There was no sleep during the next 7 hour leg from Dubai to London. All had gone swimmingly well up to this point.

We flew through Immigration ( no more of those pesky cards that you have to fill in) and nothing to declare other than a case full of Tim Tams so we heading to pick up our baggage.

After 20 minutes of waiting at the wrong carousel we were directed to the right one alongside the other 200 people and there we waited, and waited and waited....

Finally all bags were collected and we ran to the closest shop to get SIM CARDS which Anne just managed to do before they closed.

Then it was on to the rental car place.

Again,  Anne waited forever to be served - she was allocated a car, told where to go and it was not there! There was a beautiful black Mercedes Benz in that spot but we gathered that was not ours.

So in Anne went to sort it out - again a wait....but I think we did get a bit of an upgrade as we got this beauty, a Peugot with just under 19,000 miles on the clock.

All the controls were set up in Italian but we go that fixed.

In the mean time Anne asked me to call the Hotel to tell them that we were going to be pretty late arriving.

When I called them they told me that they had not been accepting accommodation at their hotel for the last three weeks.

WHAT?

They did however tell us that they had another hotel nearby that was part of the chain and maybe they could put us up for the night.

This Hotel was in the opposite direction from the one that we had booked but, what the hell, we just wanted to go to sleep.

So we finally headed off with Anne re-learning how to drive a manual car.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the HOGS BACK HOTEL and were very impressed to see this place below!

Nice huh!

Apparently it started life as a COACHING INN where traders would change horses between Portsmouth and London in the 17th Century.

Then it was expanded with a manor house and other owners used it for other things until it eventually became the Hotel it is today.

Of course Anne asked if the place was haunted and the night reception worker said that he believed so.

He himself has witness a ghost on two occasions - a lady in grey sitting at the end of the Bar watching television even when the television was not on!.

WOO HOO - our first haunted site.

We doubt however that even the hounds of hell will be able to awaken us tonight as we are about to drop off our perches - WE NEED SLEEP.

Best news though, we have been gifted a free breakfast for the inconvenience of having the change Hotels.

Now it is 1am in the morning and I need to shut my very red eyes and let my stomach try to process copious amounts of gaseous airline food!!

It could be a very windy night.

Oh - btw, the only room available was the disabled room.

So we have alarms everywhere and have to be very careful which switch we turn on or off or it could be very embarrassing.

Nighty Nights!!

Tomorrow it is New Forest and many more stops along the way.