After chatting with my wife about the holidays we’ve been on I figured I’d write up some of our less fortunate ones.
St Ives#
I’ve spent so much time in St Ives, most of our summer holidays were spent there. I love it there but sadly it’s become far to expensive and isn’t the easiest to get to if you don’t drive.
This particular holiday was rough. We went out for an evening meal to a seafood place, we’d been there enough times already and loved it. This particular time I knew the instance I’d swallowed the mussel that it was bad, I swallowed with the knowledge that this probably wasn’t going to end well. Fast forward to the next day and we have tacos for lunch, about an hour later my stomach starts to hurt and I’m burping mexican food. I start feeling worse and head back to the B&B where things get progressively worse. I’ll spare you the details of the next few days but it was hell confined to either the bathroom or bed. I was glad to get home when I was well enough to travel. Huge thanks to Sheila and Barry the owners of the B&B who looked after me. We went to same B&B for nearly 25 years (that should probably be another blog post).
Honeymoon - San Francisco#
This is supposed to be one of the best times in your life but wow was it not. In fact talking to my wife about it was what actually triggered writing this post in the first place. She’d be the first to agree that it was a bad holiday. We’re way overdue an actual proper honeymoon.
This was during a period of time where I wasn’t in a particularly good headspace, that’s an understatement to say the least. I was a nervous anxious wreck and it showed. I was mainlining Propanolol and Citalopram in an attempt to feel normal, it wasn’t working. We ended up going to the same places to eat multiple times because I couldn’t handle the city. We didn’t go out at night either. Overall it was a wasted time and I ruined the whole week there. Also why did we only go for a week???
I’m not sure why I thought that a city break would be a good idea for our honeymoon, it was before Han converted me to beach/all inclusives and cruises (more on that to come!). I’ve been lucky enough to go to SF twice in my life and I’m sad to say I’ve still never been to the Golden Gate bridge.
We made the best of it as much as we could but I did ruin it.
TUI Tugboat#
This was our first ever cruise. Han had managed to convince me that it’d be a good time. When we got to the ship things felt off, it wasn’t anything like I’d seen online it was super small and old. Our room wasn’t ready so we explored the ship and my gods it was horrible. I’ve never been so close to aborting a holiday and going home as being on that ship. Things got worse when we finally got into our room and our beds were in an L shape, we spoke to crew and they couldn’t move them. That week I slept closer to the old snoring old man next door than my own wife.
While walking around the the ship I noticed that things didn’t feel right, I thought it was because we were at sea but when we went for a drink at the top of the ship the whole thing was shaking. It turns out that one of the props was misaligned and vibrating. The whole ship was actually shaking. It made everything uncomfortable.
The funny thing was that now we look back on this holiday we count it as possibly one of our best cruises, the locations we visited were amazing and it cemented in our head that cruising was for us. Who doesn’t like going to sleep and waking up in a new city/town/country!
I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and we’ve had far more good holidays than bad. Looking back at the bad I’m always amused at just how far I’ve come and how we’ve changed as a couple. We’re off on holiday in a few weeks to Zante, as my wife puts it “to ignore each other for 10 days”. I completely get the sentiment, we love each others company and this is a great chance to chill out and enjoy reading/listening to music/playing card games.