Taking the family on holiday and melting down
After a chaotic family trip to a posh Portuguese resort, I'm contemplating the joys and stresses of travel.
Sorry for the delayed arrival of this week’s Man Feelings. I’ve just got back from a week in Portugal with the family (it’s half term) and I was in no fit state to write an email when we got home on Friday afternoon.
The theme of this week’s missive, then, is… going on holiday. Here are some Portuguese vignettes.
Why did we do this to ourselves?
I’ve written here before about me being a stressful traveller. It’s taken me a while to accept this label: when I’ve travelled abroad solo for work trips I’ve been prompt, organised, on time and well-prepared. The notion that I could be a “bad traveller” is one I bristled at when Maddy gently suggested it to me. But I’ve come to accept, after this recent trip, that perhaps in the context of transporting two kids from A to B, I’m not very good.
We somehow booked ourselves onto a 7am flight. I can’t remember what decision-making process led us to this, but I suspect it was the lesser of two evils (eg. a 9pm flight being the only alternative that day). We only live ten miles from the airport but we still had to book a 3.30am taxi, and I found myself kneeling on the street in the wee small hours of last Sunday trying to install a portable baby car seat into a stranger’s vehicle.
The kids were good on the flight, but I made the classic error of forgetting to put on my own oxygen mask first. Not literally: don’t worry mum, the plane didn’t crash. But we focused so heavily on bringing snacks and drinks for the kids and trying to make a peaceful environment for them to sleep, that when we landed at Faro airport at 10.30am, I hadn’t eaten anything all day and had already been awake for eight hours. I felt (and looked) like the living dead, not helped when I discovered that one of our suitcases had somehow lost a wheel in transit.
One queasy coach ride later and we were at our hotel… where we couldn’t get into our room for another four hours. Why did we book this flight again? I stood at the reception desk, swaying gently, as the concerned-looking hotel clerk relayed an incredible amount of information about the admittedly-vast hotel complex we’d chosen in a last-minute “let’s just book anything and get it over with” flourish.
At one point she found herself unable to remember what time the on-site gym opened in the morning and I mumbled “it’s okay, I’m not going to go to the gym”, willing her to finish telling me everything and just give me the plastic keycards. Eventually I stumbled off in a stupor of hunger and sleep deprivation to spend the mind-boggling sum of €110 on an extremely average lunch for two adults and two children.
I’m working class, get me out of here
Eventually we got into our room and I managed a nap with a seventeen-month old clutched in my arms, because she refused the hotel cot bed. We located the hilariously poorly-stocked “deli mini market” on-site (we were staying self-catering) and I riskily bought a bottle of wine with no visible price tag, purely to be able to ceremonially uncork as soon as we’d gotten the kids to bed that evening and could put the chaotic day to an end.
Waking up the next day for our first “proper” day of holiday was still challenging, though. We’d paid for breakfast and went along to the hotel grill to see how it went. I’ve never felt underdressed for breakfast before, but as couples and families wandered in wearing their best golf outfits and pressed chinos, we started to feel like farts in an elevator. Posh children walked past our table dressed in the most chic of “sad beige” outfits, and we were hit with a wave of imposter syndrome: we don’t belong here.
It was the nicest hotel we’ve stayed at, and on a luxury resort which we booked because of the family-friendly description. We eventually worked out that we needed to take advantage of the on-demand shuttle service to get around, because the main part of the resort with all the kid-friendly stuff was a twenty minute walk from where our apartment was. Someone knocked at the hotel door every evening to give us a branded postcard with the next day’s weather forecast and a selection of branded chocolates. There was a fucking lobster fork in the knife rack. This was truly how the other half lived.
We eventually got over our discomfort at not being posh enough to be there, especially when we heard some regional British accents and saw some other people dressed as scruffily as we were. We made our way down to the beach and spent time as a family walking on the sand and paddling in the Atlantic – always good for the soul. We took the kids to one of the swimming pools and had to carry them home, shivering, because all the outdoor pools were too cold for children. I belatedly remembered the receptionist advising me we should go to the heated indoor pool at the gym instead.
The mask slips
We spent Halloween at the resort and bought a cheap Michael Jackson costume for my five-year-old son who relished dancing around all day in it, to the confusion of some guests and staff who thought he was “a conquistador”.
The hotel room’s corkscrew came apart in my hands and I had to open my wine bottle with a knife. The beautiful sand-carving of a bird which dotted the hotel reception area was stencilled on by the bellboys using a plastic mold. The ornate sliding glass door of the waterfall shower in our master bedroom had a porcelain door handle which fell apart when I used it on our last day. The hilariously poorly-stocked supermarket closed for the season on the day before we left and we had to sneak snack food for the kids from the breakfast buffet, stuffing muffins and bananas surreptitiously into a bag when the waitstaff weren’t looking (of course they knew).
I spoke a single word of Portuguese the entire time—obrigado—justifying this because of the significant expense of the entire trip and deciding I’d paid the price to be an ignorant foreigner. We didn’t see anything of the country itself: the resort had its own private stretch of beach and we spent so much time ferrying the kids around its expanse that we had no energy left to take taxis into the Old Town nearby. I’m sure the rest of Portugal is beautiful and special but I only saw the industrial landfill between the airport and the hotel, and the faux-luxury of the resort itself.
Did we have a good holiday? The jury’s out: travelling with young kids is always a challenge and a seventeen-month-old in particular can’t sit still for more than ten minutes: I don’t want to sit on a coach, plane, passport control queue or taxi with my toddler again anytime soon. We also had to deal with the reality of what happens when we spend high but don’t actually want to be surrounded by rich people. Would we have enjoyed a waterpark in Tenerife more? Probably not, but I don’t think we need to go to a resort like this again, either.
Mini-feels this week
Being more Bruno
When we travelled home yesterday I was so defeated by the experience that when the friendly Jet2 clerk Bruno came to check us in, I greeted him with “how are you?”, then misheard his question in response and grunted “Birmingham” at him. “No,” he smiled, “I was asking how are you?”. I laughed, then said “tired”. He made me smile for the first time all morning (another early start, with broken baggage and no coffee), and he went on to chat to the children, help us with bags, and generally just be a bundle of sunshine in an otherwise rainy day leaving Faro.
I guess I need to… be more Bruno? He has a thankless job dealing with angry British tourists who’ve exceeded their baggage allowance, and yet he found it in his heart to jump up from his seat to tag our pushchair, and tweak the fruit-stained hand of my toddler in greeting and make her laugh as he did it. Who was this Iberian superman, with his boundless enthusiasm and cheeky goatee? I think I fell a little bit in love with him.
So that’s my mini-feel this week: a desire to be a better man when it comes to travel, stress and unexpected delays. This too shall pass, grin and bear it, we shall overcome etc etc. I need to let go, laugh more, ask for help and get over myself. Or maybe just see if I can procure some valium next time we fly as a family.