We have had a very different summer holiday – one I’ve never done in my life, and would never have imagined as a family holiday when I was young. Holidays in my childhood, if we weren’t staying with friends or family, were camping, holiday cottages of a basic nature (bungalows, more like) or youth hostels. Apart from the odd one night stopover en route to the south of France, I’d barely stayed in a hotel until I was an adult.
This year, though, we went to Crete and we went all-inclusive. After 2 years of covid-era UK holidays we felt the children were owed something different – new experiences, new country, first time on an aeroplane (at least in memory, the eldest went to Madeira when she was 1).
The appeal of the hotel resort was the combo of pool AND sea – I love swimming in the sea, and barely ever get to do it, but of course the children wanted a proper pool, and are old enough to swim in it safely now. While a villa with a pool would have been possible – we could have done it years ago, if we’d wanted to, but I wanted to wait until we had really confident swimmers – but a villa with a pool plus sea access would have been out of our budget.
So we went for the all-inclusive family friendly resort – meaning no late night party stuff but hopefully fun for the kids and plenty of swimming and chilling out for grown-ups, depending on your preference.
Our resort certainly delivered on the family friendly, chilled-out front – it was on a quiet stretch of beach with barely any through traffic, so you could spend a week there and not see a vehicle. The downside was the cabin fever element – there was a small harbour and village down the coast, but no real way of getting there without walking down the beach (which would have been hot and sweaty walking).
For the first couple of days it didn’t matter – too busy swimming and getting used to the heat, but when it got cooler in the evenings I would have enjoyed a quayside or promenade to have a stroll along.
What I had expected was that the girls would make friends round the pool, rush off to the kids club and want to join in – but I forgot that these are our kids, and we are both massive introverts. Nobody makes small talk to anyone at all-inclusive resorts, it seems, and the kids club (as it turned out) was mainly aimed at much younger kids, (though they did take part in one activity for older kids). There was a playground which was a good diversion in the evenings, but apart from the swings, mainly aimed at younger kids. Ping pong, nightly disco and things like pool/air hockey were also available but for those ours were perhaps a bit young.
The prospect of the all-inclusive meals was a great novelty to start with – and the quality better than I’d expected, being Greece there was plenty of salad, olives, fish and feta-based pastries, but it did become monotonous. One kind of mystery fish swathed in tomato sauce is very like another, it turns out – though a couple of days we did have sardines which were delicious.
The tiny, dainty desserts in little pots all look beautiful on the first day but by day 3 or 4 are very samey (and whilst I love the savoury Greek pastries, I’m not a huge fan of baklava or anything too overly drenched in honey or syrup, so all that was wasted on me).
The children ate mainly chips, cucumber, and grated carrot at lunch and dinner, but in between mealtimes, you could get snacks at the bar – they went daily for crepes made at the bar or slices of cake. Given all the swimming they were doing, I couldn’t really object.
The routine outside of the fixed mealtimes was equally odd and compelling to me – I have rarely ever had a holiday where I’ve done the same few things over and over again. Breakfast, swim in the sea, swim in the pool, aqua gym at 11.30, coffee and a snack, back to the hotel room to get dressed again for lunch, swim again, coffee again, shower, dinner. And in between those, sitting on loungers reading or playing Candy Crush. (Given all the swimming effort, I did feel I was at least getting plenty of exercise, and I did heroically visit the hotel gym a few times.)
How quickly you get sucked into doing the same things over and over when there’s nothing else to do! How easy it is to turn up at mealtimes when you don’t need to prepare or clear up, or choose which restaurant to go to – all that taken out of your hands! I found it both relaxing and slightly horrifying. I recall our holiday cottage last year – dolls-house sized cottage, match-box sized kitchen, and the amount of time we spent clearing up after ourselves and putting stuff away, because if we didn’t, there was no space for anything: this year, none of that was a problem.
I also remember the tiny, isolated cabin on a Welsh hillside belonging to my granny where we stayed in my childhood but only ever for a few days at a time – everything had to be carried there, water fetched from a spring, the toilet was a chemical one in a hut at the back. When we went back for a day last summer, I asked my mum why our visits there had always been so hyper-local – we never went on any sightseeing trips to local castles or the nearest beaches – and my mum said ‘it took so long just to do all the cooking and chores staying there, there was no time to do anything else’. It made me realise what had seemed to wonderful freedom and excitement to me as a child, was a heap of work for my mum. And of course we were happy enough playing on the side of a Welsh hillside, I wasn’t exactly demanding to be taken to castles or beaches, but revisiting the site as an adult all I could see was sheep poo and thistles – where on earth was there an empty patch of grass to run around?
Back to Greece, we did eventually hire a car and take the children to see something other than the hotel – the lovely town of Chania. It turned out to be the hottest day of the week, and the first hour tramping around in the heat was a little wearing – but then we sat in the shade of cafe parasols besides an ancient Venetian port building, and I had a proper iced coffee – and at that point it felt more like a ‘normal’ holiday.
We walked a bit more around the town and promised the children we’d choose a lunchtime restaurant that suited them, so we ended up (having walked past many amazing looking fish restaurants) in an Italian place so they could have pizza. In Greece! (Luckily there was proper calamari on the menu too so I got to have my favourite Greek food *one time* whilst I was in actual Greece. Chuh.)
The afternoon fared better as we walked around the shady back streets of the old town, which got us out of the heat, and lots of window shopping (children get to buy their preferred tourist tat and gifts for friends, I look at loads of stuff and buy nothing – the joys of being in your 40s and suddenly no longer wanting to buy stuff. Though I adored some pretty little fridge magnets that looked like tiny Greek houses and regretted not buying a couple of those). The walk back to the hire car and finding that it was hotter than the surface of the sun was not so pleasant.
This one day trip was so exhausting we didn’t want to do another one straight away – and 2 days later was Sunday, when we knew nothing would be open, so we booked another trip for the Monday, this time a boat trip. We’d bought snorkels for the girls and it was thrilling to take them swimming in proper deep water and to see shoals of fish swimming around us. But the 4-hour trip was a bit much for a 7 year old, and it was beginning to cloud over, so the swimming water got progressively colder every time we stopped – so we brought it to a close a bit earlier. Being in deep water and seeing fish all around is absolute joy for me – when I’m in the sea, I really am in my element.
The boat dropped us back in the small village round the coast from our hotel, and this was the moment it would have been nice to sit and chill in a beachside bar, wander home at our own pace, get dinner later on – but we were all in wet things and needed to get a taxi back to the hotel. I do wish we’d brought dry things to change into and had a chance to explore the village, but given we were all weighed down with wet towels, swim shoes and the snorkels it just wasn’t practical. (Swim shoes were a must, we’d bought them last summer and they’ve been so useful for any time you don’t want to go barefoot on a stony beach or round a pool).
The boat day trip was followed by a day of epic rain and thunderstorms – the clouds had built up for several days and suddenly broke over us, we saw sheet lightning flashing over the Med for hours that evening which was pure drama. Seeing the staff having to deal with the sudden flash floods pouring into the restaurant and slippery surfaces everywhere was not quite so restful.
Luckily after one more downpour, the sun returned for the last day, so we got our last few swims done in the sunshine. And then home. It does make me wonder what we’ll do next year – I think (I hope!) the girls enjoyed it; their swimming has come on in huge bounds, and they’ve had some brand new life experiences. What I’ve had, on the other hand, is a week of most choices and decisions being taken out of my hand, which does make you relax and switch off from life to some extent, but also the dreadful FOMO guilt of being in a brand new country where I saw barely any of said country.
We could have done one more day out to some of the historic sites – but it probably would have just resulted in hot, tired, fed up children. Or we could have gone to a water park for the slides and so on – but that could have been much queuing, questionable hygiene, and high stress for all concerned and the girls were so happy with the hotel, what difference would a few water slides have made? I think they’ll be taking home happy memories along with their tat, and I can leave the sightseeing and hiking for another day.
ladymissalbertine 