Having packed the night before, we left for Stansted about 6am. We arrived in plenty of time, parked and made our way to the terminal and booked in at the Ryanair desk. We then went to Ponti's where Alicea had a bacon baguette and some coffee and I had an orange juice. Once that was finished we popped to the cash machines. Alicea put her card into the machine, typed her PIN in and the machine switched itself off and rebooted, retaining Alicea's card. She was not happy as she now had no cash of her own to use. She spoke to the man at the Travelex kiosk where the machines were located, but he had no way to retrieve the card. However, he did give us a customer services phone number from where Alicea obtained the number she needed to contact HSBC. Once through passport control we made our way to the departure gate where Alicea spoke to HSBC. They weren't an awful lot of help and just said that they would post the card back.
We boarded the plane and it took off on time. The flight was uneventful, except that Alicea kept getting kicked in the back by the child in the seat behind.
We landed at Prestwick ten minutes early. While I waited for the cases Alicea went to the bureau de change to change some of her Polish and Czech money to sterling. Once she returned we went to the Hertz kiosk to pick up the rental car. I hadn't brought the paper part of my license so couldn't drive until they could verify my details with DVLA, which would be tomorrow.
We picked up the car and drove to the B&B. We had arrived quite early but the room was ready, so we dropped off our bags and walked into Ayr town centre to pick up my suit from Slater's hire shop. All of the measurements had been faxed to them so I hoped that I'd got them right. As it was, the suit fitted perfectly and I bought a shirt and a couple of ties before we went for a wander round Ayr looking for somewhere to have lunch. First of all we popped into a Wetherspoons, but they had no electricity in the kitchens so half the menu wasn't available. We then found a place on the way back to the B&B where we had a soup (I had mushroom - yummy, and Alicea had tomato and coriander) followed by a risotto for me and chicken for Alicea and we shared a bowl of chips.
We the drove down to Culzean to have a look at the castle grounds. On the way we stopped at Electric Brae, a place where the lie of the land makes it look as though the road is going uphill, when in fact it is going downhill. We pulled up in the layby and spent five minutes with the brakes off, gently rolling 'uphill'! We arrived at Culzean after the restaurant and shops had closed so we had a quick look around before making our way to Turnberry to look at the hotel we would be staying in on Wednesday.
We then went back to the B&B to relax and have a bath before going out to find somewhere to have dinner. The B&B was really nice and we stated chatting to Caroline, who owned the place with her husband Iain. She recommended a place called Ellisland to eat which was just around the corner. We decided to try it and were glad we did as the food was lovely and it was very reasonably priced. We discovered this was because they'd left a couple of items off of the bill, so we got them to rectify it, but it was still reasonable. The food was very nice too, especially the sticky toffee pudding! We were also taken with the pictures they had in the restaurant by someone whose signature looked like Hagen, or Hayden, so we're going to try and find out if we can get a print of one of the pictures.
After the meal we made our way back to the B&B for the night.
