Is there a knack to travel? I reckon there is – and I know I don’t have it! Do you?
We all know people who come back from holiday raving about the little taverna they discovered, miles off the beaten track, that looked like nothing at all from the outside but inside there’s world-class food and a five-star welcome … This does not happen to me! My luck, I find lots of places that look like nothing from the outside and are nothing inside either, unless you like snarling staff and food worse than ghastly. So while I travel in hope – always – my travel experiences are more often hopeless.
When it comes to accommodation, how come other people always find the hotels with the comfortable (not rock-hard) beds and fluffy soft (not thin, hard) towels? Me? Never. And comfort isn’t to do with price because I’ve lain awake on bench-hard beds in seriously expensive hotels. Is it just that we all define comfort differently?
I was the rainmaker for the Algarve this Easter, my arrival heralding a week of storms and horizontal rain following weeks of unbroken sunshine. Wherever I go, the locals will be saying “This is really unusual weather for this time of year” or “This always used to be a good restaurant/hotel/ bar/beach.” If I go to a hotel or restaurant based on a recommendation, you can be sure the management will have changed and the place headed downhill by the time I get there, assuming it hasn’t already closed.
The more web sites I pore over to examine others’ experiences of hotels, airports, car hire services and restaurants, and the more time I spend researching my ideal trip, the more wrong I seem to get it!
So – apart from making a note never to travel wherever I’m headed, does any of that happen to you?
If you return from travelling thinking ‘good to be home’ without having really enjoyed the trip, but you do want to travel more, this site is your ‘virtual support group’. Let’s share the mishaps and try and help others avoid those pitfalls. Let’s find the hotels and villas that cater for people like us! How do we get the inside track on travel? Can we acquire that knack? We put enough time and effort and money into planning our travel. It must be worth a try….
Sharon Pink - the reluctant founder of goodtobehome…….