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.
Thank you so much for joining in! I think we all need one holiday from hell to remind us that lessons need to be learned...just the one is sufficient though!!
ReplyDeleteSound's not good. On another hand, you had some experiences for next time. I think it's not too bad. At least we can learn something from your experience. Have you a better next trip. Good day. Wake up early and do somethings cool :)
ReplyDelete