retiredmartin

April 2024. Bulgaria.

If 2022 was the year of completing the Beer Guide, then 2023-24 is a race to complete Europe.

Talk about men being tickers, it’s Mrs RM’s who been the obsessive since buying that wooden wall chart from Ukraine with its lovely pin badges.

These are the ones we still need to do,

after this weeks rapid assault on Bulgaria (perhaps time to tone down the military analogies tbf).

The big news is that the previously tortuous security checks at Stansted took three minutes. That’s minutes, not hours, Mumsnet;

By random luck, we were selected to test out the new Stansted security scanners that don’t require you to take all your bottles of lotion and electrics out of your bag, and although the failure rate for the new X-Ray seemed to be about 58.2% we again were part of the lucky ones arriving at the Spoons with 2 hours to kill.

My priority was less a pint of Doom Bar, more an emergency dental kit as my crown had slipped.

(photos of actual crown only available to Patronised readers).

As we were called to the gate this was the scene outside;

But it cleared just before I stepped on to the tarmac. Funny that.

Sofia greeted us with 31 degrees of sunshine, a seamless discharge from the airport, and an efficient metro system (single fare 70p),

and half an hour on the M4 brought us to Serdica, where we took the wrong exit immediately,

and then found ourselves in Sofia’s apparently less than cutting-edge centre.

Decrepit vinyl shop – tick, terrifying statues – tick,

craft bar – tick.

Or perhaps not. I’m sure we’ll find out once we’ve dropped our bags in Mrs RM’s bijou hotel pick.