Booked it, Packed it, Fucked Off: A 120 Page Travel Journal

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If you haven’t already got one booked, now’s the time to start thinking about your summer holiday! It’s only a few short months until the school summer holidays, so if you have a family don’t Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, said there had been a “large surge” in bookings from the UK to holiday destinations in Spain, Greece and Italy since the government’s announcement. “This is an encouraging trend and shows the importance of providing customer confidence,” a spokesperson said. The question is would we drive or would we fly? And if we drove would we get the ferry to France?! Being the son of a pilot the husband is very much a plane geek, something he is passing onto our boys. I thought his choice would always be plane. I mean, a plane gets you there in what seems like a shorter amount of time (when you discount the airport wait!) but as he rightly points out there are all the extra waiting times you need to add in. The wait at the airport. The wait to hire a car. The need to hire (often scummy) car seats. No if we actually bite the bullet and go to France we are going old school. We would be taking the ferry to France, going the way of my childhood, and rather than my rambling on as to why this infographic from Brittany Ferries sums it up rather well. My mind began to do its work, thinking about when we may be able to get over there. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the logistics of getting six of us (at least) away at the same time, balancing everyone’s work, life plans, other commitments and of course finances is on a par with undertaking a moon landing.

Domestic travel has also received a boost. Data from the hotel technology provider Avvio showed a further 38% rise in the value of summer bookings at UK hotels and self-catering accommodation since the announcement, compared with the previous day. It said the high-end UK staycation market was booming, with August revenue for 4- and 5-star hotels up 350% from last year. Oh, and there used to be a lot of Brazilian schools there – especially in MK and DHS, as it was one of their annual holiday trips in January.)

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Thankfully, the box office were able to reprint them and we got in, but it did feel like we had forgotten how to operate in these matters. This does not auger well for the logistical exercise of getting to a different country with everything we need.

It won’t surprise anyone reading this to learn that I have a well developed persecution complex. Most weeks, despite living a largely untroubled and privileged life, I can find something to moan about. I often trot out the phrases “you couldn’t write it” or “you couldn’t make it up” to bemoan whatever the latest minor upset might be. However, after what has been a troubled couple of years holiday wise, the events of the last week or so really have been comedic. In the flush of post booking excitement I went crazy and bought some new shorts. Madness. as I have several perfectly acceptable pairs that I have only had for 20 years.

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So having flexed my credit facilities to book the thing, I was hopeful that this time Aer Lingus would be true to their word. We had to get stuff booked as the admin to actually have a holiday now is similar to buying a house and you all know how much we enjoyed that experience. Leaving it any later would add to the not inconsiderable stress that booking it actually was. We have to fill out what looks like a Spanish ESTA, but cannot complete it until we are 48 hours from departure, arrange tests of course and then before returning to the UK, complete a passenger locator form, but not until 48 hours before our return. The latter should be fun on a mobile phone with “free” WiFi in the hotel. Appreciating the absolute carnage that is probably ongoing now in the rush for UK tourists to book stuff, I feel quite smug that we have pretty much everything in the bag for prices we can tolerate.

Typhoon Lagoon (whoomp! Arrgghh! 🤭) has been open in January, they didn’t (pre covid!) close for refurbishments until nearer the end of the month and it was warm enough for swimming. He has gone on to be a great success with more stand-ups gigs, TV programs including the brilliant ‘Phoenix Nights’, ‘Max & Paddy’s Road to Nowhere’ and ‘That Peter Kay Thing’. And don’t forget to couple of charity songs he has released including Amarillo.Having ignored most of the Genie+/Lightning Lane stuff, hoping it would go away, I am also hoping that in early January, in what historically has been one of the quietest times in the parks, we will not need them. All bets are off I know, post pandemic, and there could be three hour queues for everything, but I’ll take my chances in a more positive frame of mind on that than if we were going next August. I suspect things will take a couple of years at least for crowds and travel patterns to settle again.