The Holiday That Finally Ticked Every Box (3 hours from home)

The list I can read to myself next time I'm booking a holiday and then completely ignore.

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

I am trying to book the annual family holiday “somewhere warm” but after the very expensive semi-disaster that was Ikos Olivia last summer, I feel as though I’ve lost my confidence. That was supposed to be the sort of holiday I’d rave about for years to come - a benchmark of holiday perfection. The fact that it fell short, despite its glowing online reviews and real life recommendations, has made me dithery. Especially because there’s no way I would spend that kind of money again: not to be squeezed onto sun loungers with barely a whisker’s breadth between them and to have to queue up to get into a buffet for mediocre lunch. Not when you can pay a fraction of the price for a little villa somewhere and enjoy freshly-cooked food at a little taverna nearby.

(Above: queueing up to get into the buffet at ultra-all-inclusive luxury resort Ikos Olivia.)

This is the eternal holidays-with-kids conundrum, though, isn’t it? I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating over this and going round and round in circles with my pros and cons lists. Reasons hotel resorts are great: the kids are always occupied and there’s ice cream on tap and you don’t have to cook or clean up and there’s a beach right there and you can just leave the towels on the loungers and not have them all hanging over the balcony to dry and someone comes to empty the poo-roll bin next to the toilet and you can have a little cocktail after dinner and feel as though you’ve stepped out of your normal life for a week.

Another gem from Ikos Olivia because I will never get over how far from the marketing photos it was.

But OH MY GOD! Reasons they are bad: you also have to be in close proximity to hundreds of people you don’t know, a metre away from someone at breakfast who is Facetiming with their Nan through the speakerphone of their iPhone, six feet away from a couple on the beach who are complaining about their nuggets and chips being cold. And even if people are just normal, non-obnoxious holiday-goers, it’s still loads of people and surely being funnelled into the same ten acres of Truman Show village is the exact opposite of what you want to reset your mind and relax your body?

Maybe it’s just me.

A villa, one situated as remotely as possible, would seem like the answer wouldn’t it? Except no! Also not the escape from reality one so desperately desires, because what about going to Greek Lidl to buy three dozen 2L bottles of water and milk that will curdle before you get it back to the house screams relaxation to you? Name me what it is about a car hire queue that whispers mind and body purified. Does “checking a small-size hatchback (manual gearbox) for existing damage and then negotiating a cliff-edge whilst trying to find a road sign that looks a bit like a dolphin” say emotional reset?

And then what? What about when you lie down by the pool and the kids are bored within an hour, so you have to get into the car to go somewhere, but the interior of the car is burns-level hot and the pleather takes the skin from the backs of your thighs, would you call that a break?

I can now see the appeal in all sorts of holidays - package, luxury, self-catering, even camping - but I can also identify the things I know I’ll hate, just by imagining myself there. And all this is why it has taken me since the end of November to create a very short list of holiday options but an incredibly long accompanying list of all the potential things that could be wrong with them. Send help. (If you’re desperate to see the options list, I might consider sharing. I’m just worried I’ll decide on the villa option and then one of you will have swooped in and booked it.)

Photo by Ryan Spencer on Unsplash

On the flip side of all this, I recently went on a three night break to Cornwall with Rich and the dog and it was an absolute roaring success! No notes whatsoever! Give us a week in a luxury resort in Halkidiki and we will count the ways in which it falls short of expectations. Three nights in Port Isaac with freezing temperatures, a too-small bed and a bathroom that was a ten minute walk from the bedroom? Couldn’t have gone better. I don’t think there was a single moment of stress; it was just a totally chilled-out few nights with no solid plans, no high expectations but a real sense of having stepped out of the norm.

I should reiterate, for full transparency, that we were sans kids. I do think holiday success rates tend to shoot up exponentially when you take kids out of the equation, because it completely removes the “same shit, different scenery” element.

I’m not saying I don’t love family holidays - they’re getting easier every year, and with children who are now aged 9 and 10 I feel we might have even hit the sweet spot - I’m just pointing out that an adults-only holiday is always going to be instantly more relaxing. (I’m understating it here to be polite: trips and holidays without kids are hundreds of times more relaxing.)

Rather more breast in this photo than I imagined, now that it’s upon the page. If I knew how to crop them out I would.

Anyway, I have analysed our Cornwall trip and worked out why I think it was such a success and I am writing the reasons down here, in this commemorative post, as a handy reference guide. I can look at it when I next book a holiday, which will be soon, and completely ignore all of my own advice. Here we go.

Reasons our mini break to Port Isaac was so good:

Familiarity

I had, until now, always been slightly bemused by people who went to the same holiday locations again and again. There’s a whole world to explore! Why an earth would you visit the same place numerous times? There are quite a few places I really like going back to again and again. New York would be one, though it’s been a while. The Greek islands. Paris. Cornwall. I’ve been to the Lake District dozens and dozens of times, ditto the Isle of Wight (both of them thanks to various relatives living there) but somehow I always feel that the annual “proper” holiday should be to somewhere new and unexplored.

And I do love an adventure, I really do - it’s the spice of life! - but is it not also the case that it’s a bit of a risk, when it comes to holidays? A bit of a gamble? Because pictures lie and online reviews can never be trusted and you never entirely know what’s going to be waiting for you when you arrive? The “exclusive” hotel, jammed in amongst seventeen others that look almost identical. That turquoise sea view they promised that’s only a sea view from one particular spot, if you stand on the toilet seat and crane your neck out of the tiny window. The Air BnB with 4.7* out of 5 that turns out to be next to a sewerage works and a bar that plays Europop until 1am.

I have to wonder whether there’s a certain comfort in knowing what to expect when you get to your holiday destination. Because we went to Port Isaac, a place we have visited loads of times before, and we had a really great time. Was there something very soothing about knowing what to expect? (Port Isaac and my sheer love of it needs its own post. I realise I’m stacking up extra posts like a house of cards, here, making an absolute rod for my own back, so you might be getting holiday content for the foreseeable!)

When I booked the holiday cottage I knew precisely where it was, I knew what the view would be like and where we would go to the pub and where we’d eat dinner. My mind was clear from all of the usual holiday admin that arises - itineraries, where to park, how to find the accommodation, locating a shop that’s open late in case we need supplies… I had none of the mental mayhem that usually dominates my first night away.

No Flight

Listen, I’m not saying I want to spend every single holiday in the UK for the rest of my life but I do find travelling abroad stupidly stressful. I think Rich does too. This is very odd, considering we are both seasoned travellers who have spent large proportions of our adult lives globe-trotting for our respective jobs, but it’s true. I don’t mind it so much for work stuff, but when it comes to relaxing holidays I can’t say that being herded through an airport with tens of thousands of other people to then sit in a little tin can in the sky makes me feel particularly zen.

The travel part of the holiday ends up pretty much cancelling out any of the relaxation I might gain from the lounging about part, and that’s if everything goes smoothly with car hire and flights being on time and luggage turning up and directions to accommodation being accurate.

Also we both really dislike flying. Rich moderately, me to the point where I have to deep breathe my way through take-off and landing. I wouldn’t say it’s a proper fear of flying, because I will and do fly, but it creates a lot of internal stress that I could do without, if I’m being entirely honest with myself. I do love the guaranteed sunshine and experiencing different parts of the world but equally I travelled a lot in my twenties and so I have a good idea of what I’m missing. I don’t yearn for far-flung places, though I did used to love an American road-trip…

I have noticed that I am far more relaxed and happy when we’re on a UK holiday, whereas many people can only feel truly happy on holiday if they’re abroad. Different strokes. (But, watch me book flights to Greece next week because the “annual holiday abroad” tradition is so deeply ingrained within me.)

Holiday Cottage

My fondness for holiday cottages is well-documented. I’m so into the top-quality self-catering option that I have my own holiday cottage business (The Dorset Nook, and another one coming soon!) and have booked more of them to stay in than I can even remember. I like them because in general you get masses more space than you’d get in a hotel room, you get more privacy, more flexibility to do what you fancy - eat out, eat in, eat crumpets and jam in front of the fire - and you usually pay way less, for all this, than you would a hotel room.

In the past I have been more inclined to book hotels when it has just been the two of us travelling - it has felt more luxurious, more of a treat - but we have had so many mediocre hotel experiences over the past few years that we have almost entirely knocked them on the head. Even my former “top hotel favourites” have disappointed, recently, with terrible sound-proofing issues and other annoyances that have been unforgivable for the price.

So this time I wanted a treat-y feel but without the usual hotel issues and I found a lovely little cottage, right up on the cliff in Port Isaac. It was near enough perfect. Not quite like being in a hotel, luxuriousness-wise, but with amazing views from the windows and its own little garden overlooking the harbour and a total price that was loads, loads less than booking a teeny room at one of the trendy hotels in Cornwall. Did we go for bougee cocktails before sitting down to the sort of dinner that comes with starched linen napkins and smears of foam on the plate? No we did not. We had a pint in the pub and fresh-from-the-sea lobster and it was the most perfect combination we could have asked for.

I questioned whether I was so satisfied with this because we’re getting older but then I realised something else that made the holiday so good:

We Had Low Expectations

By low expectations I don’t mean that I had set the bar low. I didn’t book a holiday fully expecting the location to be rubbish or the cottage to be disappointing. I mean that this wasn’t one of those high-stakes holidays that has the weight of everyone’s happiness resting upon its shoulders. I didn’t over-plan anything or gee the whole thing up in my head in the way that I normally do, especially when I book a fancy hotel stay. I didn’t allow my imagination to run wild, picturing myself eating brioche French Toast on a canopied terrace looking out over the spa’s “healing sound garden”. I didn’t spend hours looking at restaurant reviews on Tripadvisor. I didn’t really care what we did and that was the beauty of it. I realised that a lot of the things I think we need to tick off, for it to be a successful time away, I don’t really like doing anyway.

Finding a different restaurant every evening. Jam-packing the week with special “adventures” to find hidden coves and white-sand beaches that can only be accessed by canoe, at dawn. Ticking off the “must-sees” from the guide book. Fun if the inspiration to do something different suddenly strikes, but I don’t think I need to pre-plan an entire itinerary packed with these things anymore. I quite like the idea of not having to plan anything at all. (Which, to go full circle, was one of the only resounding successes of the Ikos trip: the fact that everything was done for you and no decisions needed to be made. I could truly relax, when I wasn’t feeling ripped off.)

My God, am I coming across as the most boring person in the world? Feel free to unfollow! I’ve done my little list, anyway, for booking the perfect holiday:

1. Don’t fly anywhere

2. Go somewhere familiar

3. Self-cater

4. Don’t overspend and therefore have ridiculously high expectations

Now all that’s left to do is not take any of my own post into account and book a swanky hotel somewhere an eight hour flight away that’s hideously out of my financial comfort zone.

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Do you want me tell you about why I love Port Isaac so very, very much? Would you like a run-down of my Cornwall mini-break with Rich? If so, give this post a “like” (press the heart button) and I’ll do a little diary covering where we stayed, where we ate and the thing we did for eight straight hours on the second day. (It’s not that, are you mad!)

If you’re a paid subscriber, look out for a bonus post called “Let-Downs in the Luxury Sector”. This is fast becoming my Mastermind specialist subject - swanky hotels that disappoint, posh brands that fail to deliver - because it riles me no end that we save up for these things so that we can treat ourselves, be wowed by an experience, have our socks knocked off, yet the reality often falls so much shorter than expectation. Expect that at the weekend - one to read as the weather starts to gear itself up for the mini heatwave, if you’re reading in the UK! Woohoo, 29 degrees, who needs to go abroad anyway?