summer holiday

I love to travel.

Which is horrendously unfair at the moment, what with me not being able to afford it. However wishful thinking about travel often allows me a chance to collect my thoughts on previous trips, and some of the happy memories they bring. I could decorate my life by fantastic travels.

My younger days were filled with trips to camp sites and villas in the friendly neighbouring country. We camped, caravanned and homed these trips across France, from Bordeaux to Paris, Nantes to… well Paris. We stuck to the coast mainly, with one visit near the capital. Each trip was different and of course, what with being a child at the time, each trip was amazing in its own right. Each had memories that have stuck with me endlessly. So… Thought I’d relate a few

One time, we stayed in a converted barn/cottage set in the middle of nowhere. I’m talking back lanes and bushels nowhere. It was perfect in that upon face value, there was absolutely nothing there of interest to a child. The first few moments were spent reading or playing with well travelled toys, until our imagination yawned at its awakening and started up. This then led to an almighty grasshopper hunt. The place was surrounded by them, and upon my brother’s insistence that they were aliens on the prowl, we began to gather them. Perhaps we had some kind of interrogation planned, I don’t recall. I do recall the fact that the things wouldn’t stay still. If they did, it was just to secrete some yellow fluid that led to screams of “He’s POOING on me!” (we were clean kiddies both in vocabulary and hygiene). We actually managed to gather quite a sum of the little excrement producers, which was awesome until tea time came, and we had to leave them there (apparently bringing grasshoppers to the table is frowned upon) and all of them were rude enough to disappear by the time we returned.

Another memory had no poignancy till later in life, when I actually got to an age to recognise the importance of it. We visited Monet’s garden, whilst still being of primary (US: elementary) school age. Sadly, at this age, the level of importance of an artist’s garden to me, computer crazed young’un was quite low. So I spent most of the time in that garden just wandering unaware of the scenes I was taking in. Although, now, I have to say doing that was fantastic, because now all I have is this child’s memory of wandering past the different scenes and thinking they were pretty for being pretty, rather than painstaking recreations of a masterpiece. I appreciated the garden for being a garden, rather than artwork.

Nope. I can’t maintain that with a straight face. I was walking around that place thinking “GET. ME. OUT.” I was a true grumble-some wart. I do remember thinking that the pond looked pretty cool though. And I remember those all too famous images like they’re the prints on my fingers.

I got older, and then the holidays took a sportier turn. One such holiday was spent sailing for the duration. We’d sail literally all day, in little Topaz dinghies. They were fab. It got to the point that we were so competent at the sailing, that we were becoming fearless, allowing the wind to tip our light boats to angles that had the tutors screaming for us to turn into the wind. Put in their perspective, watching an 11 and a 12 year old sitting in a tipping boat probably didn’t seem like the safest prospect. We loved it though. One of my brothers and I continued to sail for the next few years or so, leading to many more notable memories, including such as the day my brother destroyed his mast in a storm and the day we teamed up to beat a bunch of veteran sailors in a race, yet argue the entire time. Good times.

Older still, and now at an age where travelling alone had been feasible for a while, mother dove in the deep end and took my brothers and I, along with plus 1s / friends to another french camp resort. Two gems here, the cameraderie of a bunch of young adults given a certain amount of freedom, and the hilarity of doing this on a family campsite. Quite immaturely of  course, we forget that children are sleeping yada-yada on the way back from an evening’s drinking of the notable delicacy “Bigfoot” (a rum, beer and secret-crazy-french stuff mix) leading to a pitiful attempt at french on my part saying we had no idea etc to security and better still, leading to my youngest brother hiding underneath a caravan for an entire hour. Literallly. We were sat playing UNO! for ages, until he storms in, breathless, acclaiming (with some pride) “I did it! I hid under a caravan! He never saw me!” Well done dear brother.

There are more, so when they come to mind, I’ll pop them up on here into the “holiday” category.

As in, I’ll categorise my holidays until I’m rich enough to have another