I do love holidays, and totally agree that the easiest thing most of the times is to travel on a charter holiday. Everything is sorted out by somebody else, and your problems are always someone else's problem. Really useful when all you want to do on your holiday is relax and let everybody else fix just about everything. It's like traveling with your parents the way it was when you were little, except you have to pay for your self now.
But a few hiccups may still come along. For me it's mostly the people, the place or the resort.
The people.
It all starts at the airport. If you ever had doubts about man being a herd animal, a visit there should eliminate all of that. There are two kinds, the one that stay together with their travel company, and move as a complete herd, never budging even an inch to let anyone true even though they are moving at the slowest possible pace possible to man. And there are the ones that stray of from each other all the time, only to discover a second later that they lost their buddy, and then start yelling and waving all over the place to get their attention and try to complete the pack again. If you get caught in the crossfire between this people,you can usually get to listen in on their whole life story and what they plan to buy or not - even if you try your best not to.
And then you finally get to board the plain. And no matter how many times the flight attendant tells people to either board the plane in a set order, to keep the seatbelt on, stay seated, use the bathroom before meal service, not to take down luggage before the sign with the seat belts get turned of - there is always some idiots that have to do it. Usually the same idiots that never tell their kids to stop kicking the seat in front of them. I don't know what's wrong with them. But clearly they think that ordinary rules don't apply to them.
The sun bed mafia.
They are up early in the morning, strutting not so silently in load flip flops across the tiles around the pool, armed with a stack with towels. With a smirk the lay them out carefully on every sun bed they might want or need during the day. And then they go for breakfast. So when the other kind of people, us, finally becomes human again, there is no luck trying to find a free bed around the pool. It usually ends with us walking around the pool round after round trying to find two that are free, or look like they are going to be free anytime soon. So when we finally do, it's usually good old fashion luck, or because some kid from the sun bed mafia forgot to but their towel on their bed when they went for lunch.
So me and my man, we bunker down and spread our stuff so that it is obvious that its taken. But when lunch is done, that's when the fun begins. Cause then they come back - the mafia. Looking on us in disbelieve, not really believing that we could be so stupid to think that the beds were free - when all the parents stuff is laying right next to it (oh, what's that yours, well we just moved it, since it wasn't laying directly on the beds and no one came to claim it!). And we lay there watching their reaction behind sunglasses, watching to see their next move, pretending to be asleep if necessary. Half the time they choose to trash talk loudly about how the were saving exactly that bed for later, either in some Scandinavian language or English (ps. those languages don't work for talking secret on charter holiday, the odds for someone speaking either language is quite large). The other half they just opt for making it uncomfortable for us. Move number one; move your sun bed so close to us that it's nearly touching ours. Move two; talk so loud that it's disturbing no matter how high you listen to your music. Move three; make your kids come to you all the time to show you things, the result being dripping cold water all over our stuff and us. Move four; if none of the above has worked come even closer (preferably so close that the sun beds are actually touching). If that's not invading personal space I don't know what is. Move five; block the access to the pool.
If your immune to all of this and none of it makes you feel unwanted in their present, you have some kind of superpower I sure as hell don't have. I usually get annoyed by move 3. But I never budge. I refuse to let the sun bed mafia win. I think it's rather amazing that some people are so bad at sharing that they think that they can reserve a sun bed for a whole day even if they are not gonna us it all the time. What is that teaching their kids? That you don't have to share as long you might possibly plan to use it at some point during the day. That's gonna make some really cute kids.
The British pool terrorists
I'm not saying all British are like this, don't get me wrong! The are plenty of nice British people. But some are not. We have encountered some on this holiday. They are the only grown up people that actually think it's ok to play water volleyball in a pool filled with people that are not. The end result being that good damn ball being thrown on everybody or at least splash on everybody. If your really lucky they also bring a big floating air mattress into the pool, and what the hell - why not just bring a boat? Combined with continued jumping - probably trying to make the biggest water bomb ever know to man - is the reason I have named them the British pool terrorists. And btw people - everyone speaks English.
And there is oh so many more things that annoy me, but this is the worst of them...... I leave it at that!
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