1. Gatwick to Beef Island (Mick)

There must be a better way to start a holiday than a 4am alarm getting you out of bed.

To be fair, my holiday actually did start better than that, as the alarm was to get Clare out of bed and I hung on in sleepy denial for another 20mins or so before bowing to the inevitable. We've had a busy 2009, and haven't been away since Christmas, so we're all ready for a good break.

We'd had a bit of hassle getting Ciaran a last minute passport (long story) so were delighted the journey went well, we got out on time, checked in early, took off on time and had a good flight over. We'd booked Virgin, the family favourite, so enjoyed a couple of films with "Looking for Eric" as the standout:

The Virgin plane landed at 1pm local time and we then had a few hours to kill in Antigua airport before catching the LIAT airlines flight to Beef Island in Tortola. This was quite a cool flight as it was a small propeller plane, full with less that 40 people on board. It was more like getting on a bus than a plane, especially as it had a row of five seats across the back, perfect for the naughty kids coming home from school, or the Hegarty family going on holiday. This flight was only an hour and while the views either side were pretty cool everyone was too dozy from the long day to get very excited. Things got more excited when we landed in Tortola, as it turned out that the plane had carried rather less luggage than passengers. We were relatively lucky as we got four bags our of five, but mine was nowhere to be seen. Our host, Jon, later explained that LIAT stands for Luggage In Another Terminal, though in fact that is only one of several affectionate interpretations.

After a 40min queue to fill in a missing luggage form we met with David our taxi driver and came over to Limeberry. It was on this journey that everyone began to realise how different this place was. It wasn't any one thing, but the combination of accents, heat, sounds, vegetation and nightlife are very different to our usual Mediterranean or US holidays. Which is what we were after of course.

Jon met us at the house, we'd said we were fine but when I'd mentioned that this was our first trip to the Caribbean he was keen to welcome us in person. The house looks fantastic, but we all headed for the best part of it - bed.