More Hell Than A Hella Holiday

Holidays:    We spend nine and a half months of the year saving up for and looking forward to time away somewhere for two weeks.  This’d better be good, right?   Hell, this’d better be great! 

The weather needs to have a word with itself and behave.  Same goes for the humans!   There must be no fights.  At all.  Everyone has to be jolly and smiley and nice and never, ever short tempered or tired or cranky.  No-one can get sick!     In other words, hit robot-mode with the setting firmly at happy-at-all-times.  In reality things rarely work out like that.  Flights get delayed.  Sat nav goes on its own little holiday and sends you all over the place.  There might be car sickness if small children are involved.   Or big people with hangovers!   

And people do get sick on holiday.  I got the worst cold of my life on honeymoon in Italy which meant I couldn’t breathe properly or taste a single thing for the first week.   I broke out in a horrible heat rash and the mossies loved me almost to death.  All I wanted to do was sleep.    

Personally I think holidays with small children are to be avoided at all costs.   It’s just not worth it.   Small kids need naps.   They like routine.   Their bedtime doesn’t change.  And worse still, neither does their wake-up time.   4am hello, did you not get the “office closed due to holidays” memo?

Our boys have never set foot in Dublin Airport, or any other for that matter, so we have always holidayed at home.  The infamous staycation.  And we love it.  

We had such a good time on our first mini-staycation that we did a silly thing:  tried to repeat the experience the following year.   Don’t do it, folks.   Just don’t.  It was a disaster.  We opted for Clonakilty in Cork and big, huge lesson learned – 2 adults and 4 kids will not fit into even the largest of hotel family rooms.  Don’t believe them!   The beds were side by side – if you wanted to get to the other side of the room to use the bathroom, for example, you did it by climbing over all of the beds.  We were there for three days so we decided to make the most of it.

Remember I mentioned getting sick on holidays?

It happened to us.  One of the boys had way too many coco pox and zero Weetabix for breakfast.   (This has turned out to be a recurring theme in his life. Another lesson!)     He was miserable.  We were miserable.  I slept on the floor one of the nights in order for him to get some proper sleep.

We did not avail of the in-house baby-sitting option.   So no date night for us. 

We were back in the cramped, stuffy and nasty hotel room at 8pm every evening with tired, cranky and constipated kids.  There were the usual early wake-ups.

And it rained.  All the time. 

It was such a shit, disappointing holiday Mister Husband and I decided to see if we could salvage something of it by staying one last night.   Somewhere else.

The receptionist booked us into a guest house in town and off we went.   This turned out to be a wonderful idea.   It more or less saved a desperate holiday.  We would have stayed an extra night but they were already booked out.

I am very thankful to report that was our first and only disappointing holiday.   

We have gone on to have great times.  I wrote  blog posts about it here and here.  Go on.  Have a look.  This is where we stay if you want to check out our accommodation.   

This blog post was brought to you today courtesy of an invitation from Elizabeth who writes at Life on Hushabye Farm.   If you click on this link you can read all about other holidays from hell.   Or even submit your own.