Holiday Road

Only 13 more sleeps now before we head back to Crete for a long overdue holiday. We had so much luck in finding a great little hotel in a quiet little seaside town last time. Here's hoping that the place will live up to our expectations again. In our support, we did do a bit of research first, so it was entirely luck. Maybe something like a 70/30 split in favour of luck. In any case, it has worked out perfectly for us.

The little hotel we stay in is owned and operated by a semi-retired Greek couple whos families have lived in the area since about forever. The wife does pretty much all of the work around the place and doesn't really speak much English. She is extremely pleasant though, and is forever running out with assorted baked treats whenever she spots us. The husband is a bit of a lazy arse, it has to be said. Not that he doesn't do anything, he's always off for a swim in the ocean at 7am every day. He just doesn't seem to lift a finger to help around the place. I think he considers himself more of a "PR" type of guy. He speaks ok English. Not great, but enough that we can have a decent chat in the evenings. Which creates a problem of it's own as no chat seems to be able to take place without a decent lashing of the local moonshine. A few times we tried to sneak through the bushes past the pool on the way back to our room, but old Eagle Eyes spotted us in a flash. So I'm preparing myself for a few long and colourful nights. Nicer people you couldn't ask to meet and they've even reserved our room from last year for us again.

Picking a nice quiet place to just relax and get away from things for a couple of weeks probably illustrates where we are in life. We've long since outgrown the Benidorm, Bali, Phuket holiday freaks shows. Go to those places once and you realise why you only ever go there once. We work bloody hard all year, and the last thing either of us want is to be stuck in the same area as drunken football teams on end of season piss-up holidays, or the never-ending stream of package tour families. Don't get me wrong, I love kids. Just not other people's. Before leaving New Zealand, we went on a couple of holidays on the island of Vanuatu. For anyone not familiar, it's the former New Hebrides islands. Vanuatu was right on the border of our holiday requirements. Lovely accomodation (I'm happy to walk around all day but I want a proper bed when I come home), friendly locals, great local food, and not known by a lot of tourists. That last part was the clincher for us in our decision to go there a second time.

Like our village in Crete, we chose Vanuatu a bit by luck. When we decided to get married, the location for the wedding was tough. A wedding in NZ would upset our Swedish family, while a wedding in Sweden would upset the Southern Hemisphere family. In the end we decided that, if we had to upset someone, then we would upset everyone equally. We decided to get married in neither of those places. Can't ever be accused of playing favourites. We looked around the region and settled on 3 possible places. All seemed equally attractive so we decided to write to them all and the first one who replied would get our booking. and that's how we ended up discovering the gem which is Vanuatu. Come to think of it, that's how we finally decided on our hotel on Crete as well. So it's a pretty robust system.