OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS
0225 Foreign Holidays – Majorca
Our 1978 overseas holiday as a family was to Majorca, then the other main British holiday resort after Spain. We stayed on its south coast, where all the tourists stayed - particularly the Germans. We had booked the cheapest holiday, in rooms in bungalows in the garden of the hotel. It turned out that these were really horrible. They were badly maintained and dirty. Accordingly we spent the first day getting transferred to the main part of the hotel. This was not much better, but it was just about tolerable.
Anyway it had the requisite swimming pool where the children could play to their heart's content.
On the hotel balcony in the pool and on the beach
Despite the above photograph, I can't even remember going to the actual seashore. It was only about half a mile away but it wasn't particularly pleasant. Indeed, the resort itself was not particularly pleasant, just a collection of hotels which stretched from there to Palma.
Once more we had a range of excursions. Of course we went to Palma itself, which wasn't too far away. It was an interesting old town with a nice cathedral and was full of holidaymakers.
One evening we also went to a nightclub, which was something of a disaster. It took us nearly two hours to get to the nightclub. This was not because it was that far away, but because we had to stop at every other hotel before we got there; so what would have been about a 20 minute journey actually took two hours. That was bad enough, but when we returned at midnight the reverse was true; and we got back to our hotel at something like two o'clock in the morning. It was not the greatest experience. I can well remember the coach trip getting there and back. I can't remember a thing of the nightclub.
More successfully
we took the tour across to the mountainous
parts on the north west of the island. We stopped off
where Chopin and George Sands stayed in the monastery,
which was fairly pleasant but not really exciting. We then continued down to
the seaside town where the railway ran from Palma. I can remember the very rocky
countryside and the difficulty the buses had in getting around the narrow
passes, but again little of the resort at the other end of the journey.
The Majorca railway
The other
major tour was to the north-east of Majorca, where we visited the Caves of Drach
-- underground caves with lots of stalactites and sta
lagmites
which were impressive. We then went on to what was supposedly a very exclusive
hotel on the north-east coast; though we were only allowed to look at it from a
distance – in the pouring rain and – which rather dampened the whole excursion!
It was, though, certainly a much
better part of the island. If we ever were to go back, that was where we would
go.
On the rainy beach at Formentor
I can remember buying the obligatory souvenir drink, which was alcohol with some sort of herb submerged in it. Maybe it was the local drink but it proved to be undrinkable -- and we couldn’t even use it in our cooking.
Again, despite the relative squalor, the main thing was that the children enjoyed themselves and coped with the travelling far better than we had expected.
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