Holidays in Hel

Some of you will be aware that I have just been on holiday. I had a week in Crete in a very nice hotel on a holiday that consisted of very little other than swimming, reading, sleeping and eating nice food. Absolutely just what I needed in order to get me rested after a very busy time and to put me in good stead for teaching on Folkworks where I am now. The only thing that went wrong was the on set of some heat rash, pretty much everywhere, which I have ‘t had for years. I use a special sun cream for sensitive, allergic skin and for decades now it has removed that problem but this year……not so lucky.

It did get me thinking about holidays and what you remember about them and, like many things in life, it is often the things that go wrong that stick in your mind rather than those blissful moments where the holiday has gone swimmingly well but nothing has stuck in your memory other than…’it was lovely’.

This one wasn’t all plane sailing. We’d booked a private taxi to take us to Gatwick to save frying on the underground in London. He was half an hour late which ate into all our contingency time meaning we only arrived with ‘enough time’ instead of ‘plenty of time. He also took a route that neither of us recognised and had us constantly thinking that we weren’t actually getting any nearer. Then in Crete our hotel had booked us a transfer to the airport and he got a flat tyre on the way.

I mentioned this previously on Facebook as the funny side of that was he tried to crank the car up, with both of us inside, in order to try changing the tyre. I think his thinking was that having a flat tyre and making his passengers late was already too much without frying them at the side of the road but he hadn’t factored in the combined weight of two people who’d done little other than eat or swim for a week. As I said then…he would have needed an elephant hoist to lift the car not a small crank. Anyway, it wasn’t possible as you can imagine and they sent a replacement taxi. We just made it…again. I suppose it made bookend stories of the holiday and had a certain poetry about it if rather stressful poetry.

One holiday that has always stuck in my mind was one we’d booked in Tuscany. We both love Italy ….the countryside, food, wine etc so we thought a week in Tuscany would be fab. We’d booked a self catering house via the internet and it was in a tiny little village about an hour and a half from the airport along loads of windy roads. When we finally arrived at our destination we wanted to get into the house and out for a meal before the restaurants closed. We found the house but could find no key and no message . After quite a lot of feeling stressed, checking documentation etc etc I took a walk down the hill to what looked like a little farm stead and sure enough the key was essentially sorted with the people there. Apparently they had no idea when we were going to turn up and we had no contact details to let them know!

We didn’t really even look round once we had the key but pretty much dumped our bags and went off and found one of the two little taverna’s in the village. We shared a bottle of wine over a nice meal and all in all things were looking and feeling a lot better.

Once back at the house we soon realised that heat was an issue. It was a very old house with thick walls but it was still boiling and there was no air conditioning. The house had bedrooms on the first floor which all felt oppressively hot and no air going through and then a large attic space with windows on all sides that had air flowing through it. That was the only logical choice of place to sleep and so we headed up the last flight of stairs to the airy attic beyond.

I was in front and my companion was behind. As we started to emerge into the room a voice behind me said, ‘there’s a scorpion on the wall and you’re going to have to kill it!’ Sure enough there, quite high up in the wall was a scorpion about two inches long. I have never seen one in Western Europe before or since actually. So there I was at about midnight standing on a chair with a shoe in my hand thinking …I’m only going to get one bash at this and I don’t want to miss otherwise it might be scurrying around the floor all night. I’m sad to say that I achieved my aim and sent the beast off to scorpion heaven .

It was only after the holiday I was left wondering why I had accepted the role of scorpion slayer without question!

If you’re like me and have had a problem with an insect…or several insects it does make you rather sensitised to it. To such an extent that we kept feeling that something was crawling around the bed under the sheets. Sleep was not coming easily. This happened for long enough that eventually we turned the bedside light on and whipped the sheet back and sure enough there was a black beatle in the bed. That got thrown out rather than squashed and later on the same thing happened again….Alexander beetle number two. That was not the best nights sleep of the holiday.

After that things improved with some wonderful sallies out into Sienna and surrounding villages. I remember seeing the incredible marble floor depiction of the ‘massacre of the innocents’ in the cathedral and the amazing sloping arena type square where apparently they do horse racing.

On the Tuesday night we headed off sleepily to bed when the local disco started. Somewhere in a village near by music blasted out until 1am and was bouncing round the Tuscan hills and seemingly taking on volume with each reverberation. It was an irritation that meant that sleep again was long in arriving.

Hot and sticky the next day and a little disgruntled we were about to go out when my companions back went. One of those excruciating things where you can barely move. Sitting hurts as does standing or lying down and trying to do anything between those postures was excruciating . Dosed up with painkillers and moving very slowly we had an ‘ok day’ under the circumstances but ate in for simplicity and an early night.

The back had eased a bit the following day and so that evening we decided to eat out again but in the other taverna this time. We had a very pleasant meal and I seem to remember eating pizza that had marinated artichokes on it. That night all seemed well until I got an overwhelming urge to projectile vomit. Fortunately I made it to the bathroom but spent pretty much the whole of the night there one way or another.

Our final day I was feeling better but very tired but my companions back went again! There we were – myself recovering from what was presumably a small bout of food poisoning, a companion in agony and …..yes, you may have guessed this was going to happen….up starts the second disco of the week only being a Friday it went on much longer. Last thing I remember was the irony of us both lying there singing, ‘sweet dreams are made of this’ as we’d kind of given up being irritated as we were going to have to see it out one way or another.

Due to the back problem and not knowing if my companion was going to be able to do the trip to the airport in one go we had decided to give ourselves the extra hour and leave very early….after little sleep. It’s like a chorus now that phrase isn’t it. I lugged two very heavy suitcases down to flights of stairs to the hire car, crow barred the afflicted into the passenger seat and off we went. It turned out we didn’t need to stop after all and so spent an incredible amount of time trying to remain comfortable..ish in a very uncomfortable airport.

How could so much that could go wrong go so wrong in one week? Not surprising that we’ve never forgotten it. A year or so alter for one reason or another we did an analysis of holidays in hotels verses holidays in self catering and much to our surprise hotels came out on top. We’d assumed the ability to not be disturbed I.e. sleep,as long as you want and eat in occasionally etc would outweigh the hotel stuff but it didn’t prove to be true for us. It’s been almost exclusively hotels ever since.