Day 22 - Tuesday 3rd October - Malta

Raining, raining, raining so we had a very slow relaxed start to the day. But it's still quite warm so the humidity is killing me, so together with my foot which is still causing me extreme pain I'm not doing great. I did a bit of packing because we have an extremely early start tomorrow and we finished off our breakfast supplies. When there was a break in the weather we set out to explore a bit more before the the rain came back. We headed down the steps in our street instead of up as we usually did and when we came to St John's Street that has a view over the harbour, we waited to see another enormous cruise ship leave the harbour because we'd heard its horn several times. It was an MSC ship like the one we went on for our Mediterranean Cruise in 2009. We headed up St John's Street and the plan was to go to see St John's Co-Cathedral. Not sure what a Co-Cathedral was but thought we might find out. The was a bit of a queue to get in and we baulked at the €10 entry fee. We can't ever remember paying to get into a church!  So we went for a walk all the way down Republic Street instead. By the time we got back to the church it was raining and there was a queue a mile long of people waiting in the rain to get in. Really? ? Next plan was to hop on the little tourist train that John always refuses to go on after our experience in Nice.  But given the choice of walking around in the rain he agreed to go on the it. While we were waiting there was a huge police and military presence outside the church exit. The previous day we'd noticed the extra flags that were up all over the city and googled which country they belonged to. We discovered that the dignitary that was visiting was the King of Botswana! Well, we saw him come out of the church under an umbrella held by some official,  hop into his waiting limo and drive off with a police escort! The train struggled its way up the very steep streets we'd trudged up and around corners that we didn't think we'd make it around and we saw parts of the city we hadn't got to and stayed dry. We had a noisy group of Dutch people behind who thought everything was hilarious and a group in front of us who rolled up the plastic window to see and I had to ask them to pull it down because i was getting wet. Still raining when we got back so we headed home to give my foot a rest and do more packing. When the rain had stopped we went out for a walk to the Upper Barraka Gardens for a last time and took some more photos. We went back to Str.Eat Food for dinner and John had another burger, the Vegi D and I had a Chicken Caesar Salad, both delicious. Then an early night because our alarm would be going off at 4am! John called the taxi number we had from our trip in from the airport only to be told that he had to call the Valetta taxi number. Which he did only to be told that he'd have to call in the morning 30mins before we needed the taxi. So we set one alarm to get up and one to call the taxi. And so to bed to try to sleep for a few hours.