Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Formal photo shoot in Turkey

Sun, 02 Aug 2015 20:29:29 GMT

The all-inclusive resort we stayed in during our week in Turkey in May offered a formal family photo shoot as part of the package - though of course print-outs/digital copies thereof cost extra. We decided to have a go at it. The end results were admittedly rather cheesy, especially compared to the glorious ones from melissa_maples (See them here: DW/LJ) but we went for a few anyway. It’s nice to have one framed family portrait in the house!

Bloke, me, Humuhumu and Keiki in a train on a sun lounger.

( +3 )

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The epic Turkey photo post.

Tue, 26 May 2015 22:29:42 GMT

The resort we stayed at in Turkey on our recent holiday was one of these all-inclusive five-star jobbies. The bloke and I are not normally “all-inclusive five-star” sort of people. We’re more “tent in a field”, “youth hostel” or "self-catering" types. I can't claim this is due to any high-minded moral sense. If we stay somewhere fancy we can afford two days, whereas if we camp, we can afford to stay a week. Since having tiny children and decent salaries, however, we’ve (with varying degrees of reluctance) discovered staying in hotels.

When the opportunity came up to have a beach holiday in a country where we could actually afford “all-inclusive five-star”, though, it seemed a good time to try it and see what the fuss was about.

We arrived late at night, because that’s how these things work with package deals and charter flights. Humuhumu dealt with it admirably well after having fallen happily asleep on the plane and subsequently being woken multiple times for the bus journey from the airport to the hotel and finally when her parents insisted on raiding the late-night buffet ten minutes before it shut because they hadn’t had any dinner. The buffet was pretty amazing, given that it was almost 1 AM. We were given wristbands that allowed us to wander freely around the hotel eating and drinking All The Things (and there was a hell of a lot on offer everywhere), and our room cards.

We slept until late morning. This was one unanticipated bonus of travelling two time zones ahead of British Summer Time: it meant Humuhumu was time-shifted two hours later than usual. We could, therefore, have leisurely evening meals, walks along the beach and drinks at the outside bar before we went to bed. Unlike the other parents of small children who were staying at the resort, we’d not had the foresight or ability to bring along siblings with no children of their own and/or grandparents. The time-shift allowed us to claw back some of the disadvantage of not having any babysitters. (The minimum age for babysitting services offered by the resort was four years old.)

Breakfast was our first opportunity to observe the other occupants of the resort. I’d say at least 75% were retired couples, which had the unfortunate effect of making me think constantly of Jeremy Paxman’s crack during the UK’s recent general election: “My generation has blown our inheritance on Mediterranean holidays and is refusing to die. If you want to be rid of us, pray for cold winters, or vote.” Judging from the languages on the signage and menus, most were either British, German or Russian. The remaining 25% were couples with very young children and their grandparents, or couples having a romantic getaway. And there were four very tanned, very tattooed, very fit young men from Essex who’d clearly made a terrible misjudgment of the tenor of the place. They were quite sweet and seemed to be making the best of it, which couldn’t have been that difficult when it’s 35 C and you can bounce between beautiful swimming pools and the crystal-clear Med and drink beer and eat ice cream all day. Still, we felt a little sad for them. But not for long as we were too busy enjoying all those things ourselves.

The food on offer was pretty spectacular, and you could eat surprisingly healthy and delicious meals without much effort.

You could also eat a lot of pastries afterward, which we did.

I revelled in having no cooking or washing up to do, although I don’t find those tasks as onerous as I did a few years ago.

Still, it’s not an indulgence I would want on a yearly basis, even if I could afford it, which I can’t. I feel faintly uncomfortable with a level of service that includes fresh towels every day (honestly, we’re not that filthy), although I’m fully on board with a minibar that gets restocked daily. It was also very loud with thumpy music every night and we had to keep the balcony door closed until 3 AM or so. Our resort had evening entertainment that only went on until midnight, but all the five-stars are on the same strip of beach in the town and cater for different clientele so the late-night partying can be heard by everyone. That wasn’t so bad on the first night, when it was only 28 C during the day, but it went up to 38 C by the end of the week and it got pretty stuffy even though the humidity stayed pretty low. I’m not fond of air conditioning, having grown up in the tropics where you’re constantly going from “dry frigid arctic” indoors to “wall of sweaty heat” outside in the summer, so not being able to have fresh cool air wafting into our room all night caused a little bit of resentment.

I might like to try it again when the children are older and we could take advantage of the child care on offer. Then we could use more of the resort’s facilities, like the spa and the restaurants, and perhaps go out into the town at night. But I wouldn’t be that fussed if we never went “all-inclusive five-star” again.

( Photos: eating drinking napping sea pool )

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A visit to Antalya

Fri, 22 May 2015 20:06:43 GMT

Disclaimer: I must emphasise that I didn’t take any of the photos in this post. They were all taken by melissa_maples, who kindly rescued us from our magical ability to get lost even when given very specific directions, and led us to cake and culture in Kaleici. Not only is she a great tour guide, she is also a fantastic photographer and regular blogger and is pretty much directly responsible for our location choice for this holiday. I’m over the moon that we have her photos to remember this trip into Antalya (we were staying at a resort in Kemer, about an hour away by bus) and that there are several lovely ones of all of us together.

Once Melissa had found us, we determined that the first order of business should be cake. We stopped at Güneş to eat tiramisu. The Turkish formula for tiramisu seems to be as follows:

Remove alcohol, substitute additional chocolate
Make cream filling as light and fluffy as possible
Serve pieces nearly as large as baby’s head
Profit

I can confirm that we cleaned our plates.

( +lots of words & photos )

Tourist family shot overlooking Kaleiçi.

Everybody smiling in Kaleiçi, except for Keiki who was pretty adamant about looking the other way.

Having admired the bay from several angles, we decided to start the hour and a half journey back to Kemer. We’d had a grand time and we figured it was best not to push Humuhumu too hard. She conked out almost immediately, clinging to the bloke like a baby koala, so we’re pretty certain that was the right decision.

It was terrific to spend facetime with an LJ friend I’ve known online for over ten years, and to be treated to such a tour of their city. I’ll treasure the memory of this day out. I’m so grateful to have these pictures to remind me of everything we did (and ate, yay fooood). melissa_maples: <333333333!

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Keiki and the Med

Wed, 20 May 2015 14:27:27 GMT

Me, standing in the cool water of the Mediterranean Sea and lifting Keiki over my head.

Our feet in the sea.

In case you've been wondering about the week-long silence - and even if you haven't - we returned home from our beach holiday in Turkey this morning at 4 AM. I've had about four hours of sleep in the past 48, so am a bit *stare*y.

It was pretty great, though, and I have a gajillion photos to share, and I'm looking forward to catching up with everyone's entries. But first, SLEEP.

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