This holiday has been a long time coming! With my mother passing away at the beginning of the year, it has been an exhausting and tiring year as we have coped with all that entailed.
Mark Warner, the holiday company, specialise in activity holidays – in particular water sports. Donna had always wanted to learn to sail, and I wanted to learn how to dive, doing this in the warm Mediterranean Sea seemed an ideal way to go about this! It proved to be a good decision. One of the benefits of learning a completely new skill was that it was so absorbing and required such attention that neither of us could spend much time thinking about work! The diving theory was quite a challenge, it required about three or four mornings of sitting in the hotel room, going through a manual and memorising. However, it was really worth it, as I gained my PADI open water qualification, able to dive to 60 feet. Donna got a bit bruised as she tried to move from one side of the boat to the other when tacking or jibing! We bought her a blow up child’s floatation ring to sit on, as her coccyx was so painful!
The holiday got off to a good start when I broke the news that I had a financial windfall of £4,200! Before the holiday I had been in contact with a ‘no win – no fee’ company who looked into whether I had been miss sold Payment Protection Insurance. I don’t know what made me do it – I think I had been over worried about money. Anyway – it did mean that all the drinks and other expenses were covered for all four of us!
Mark and I had a particularly good time at the local water slide park – as the video shows! One of the slides dropped you straight down a huge black hole, gaining you so much momentum, so that you went straight up to the top of the next part of the slide – a half pipe.
Both the Mark Warner staff and the local Greek hotel staff were exceptional, as were the amenities and the food. The hotel is well positioned with two beaches, one for swimming and one for sailing.
We hired a car and explored the island. Much to our amusement and consternation, the Greeks appear to treat roundabouts differently to the way we do. You have priority if you are approaching the roundabout, and the traffic on the roundabout has to give way to you. Some people seemed to know this, others clearly didn’t!
We would be very happy to go back again another year, but unfortunately, this was the last year Mark Warner were going to be based at the hotel.