On Sunday I posted the first half of my tales from my first holiday without my parents, and it's safe to say that it was certainly a crazy week away! I've already covered being cursed by African women, breaking the hotel door, fabulous drag queens and our encounters with Steve the Conman. You'd probably expect that the rest of the week would be tame in comparison, but I can ensure you, it got a whole load weirder.
Wednesday morning rolled around, signalling two things. One, we were half way through our holiday and two, it was finally the day to go to the water-park, Aqualand. I was really looking forwards to going, it had been the only thing we all agreed on wanting to do, and we'd been planning this day since we booked the holiday. But for me, fate would have it that I wasn't feeling well at all, and was definitely not in any fit state to go throwing myself down any water slides. The others all went without me, and I spent half the day moping around my room and being sick (lovely), before I decided I was well enough and not going to waste my day. I dragged myself out for a walk around the area, and wound up sitting on a bench opposite the beach for a few hours, calling home, writing, and reading Breakfast At Tiffany's. I made a few friends on my adventures, such as an old British couple from Kent who came and sat with me for a while; and a really beautiful Spanish policeman who was on duty, but came over for a chat. Lucky me. It very nearly made up for missing Aqualand, very nearly.
(Shameless selfie, and the bench I spent many happy hours on)
Determined not to spent another night in Sparkles, as a group we decided to go and play Crazy Golf. A few years ago, I got a hole-in-one once at the Pirate Mini-Golf in Weymouth, and I never fail to bring it up every time I play Crazy Golf. It pretty much qualifies me to be a professional. Fact. It was absolutely hilarious, and I somehow managed to come a respectable 3rd which I was pretty chuffed with. It was nice to have a chilled night out, having a laugh and not drinking.
Thursday was a pretty action packed day for us, as 4 of us had booked to go on an activity day. We spent our morning banana-boating, jet skiing and being dragged behind a jet ski on a giant inflatable donut. It was awesome, even though I was absolutely petrified of Sophie's driving skills on the jet ski, convinced I was gonna fall off the back into the depths of the sea. And as for being dragged on the donut, it was completely hilarious! Sophie managed to get flipped through the air and land on poor Natalie and Lisa, which may not have been so funny for them, but I found it hysterical. It was not as funny as at the end of the morning however, when the instructor drove us back to shore on a jet ski, and made us jump off into the shallows onto the beach. I did it rather disgracefully, showing beach-goers far too much of my arse, but Sophie, who was being cocky, thought she would show off and jump onto the beach elegantly, but in fact slipped and face-planted into the sea. Definitely a You've Been Framed moment.
The main activity I was looking forwards to though, was parasailing. It looked like so much fun, and I'd always wanted to try it, but things went a little bit pair-shaped. To begin with, one of the clips holding me to the parasail wasn't closed, so I was on the verge of only being attached by one clip, but this was the least of my problems. There Lisa and I were, happily flying along behind the boat, when we notice the rope getting slack and floating on top of the water. That's when we started going down. Lisa was panicking, I didn't clock onto the situation at all, completely oblivious about what was about to happen. We ended up being dragged along behind the boat underwater, for about 20 seconds, before the idiots 'supervising' realised we weren't in the sky anymore. Lisa luckily bobbed back up above the water and was able to breathe. Me? Nope, I was being pushed down, trapped beneath the bar I was attached to, unable to breathe. I'm not exaggerating, but I genuinely couldn't breathe, and was panicking that I wasn't going to resurface again. According to Sophie and Natalie who were on the boat, the two men in charge weren't watching us at all, and only saw what had happened when everyone else on the boat started screaming and panicking about us.
Drowning aside, I did have a really good time. You can be assured that Lisa and I gave the instructors a piece of our minds when we got back on the boat, but we didn't get anything by means of apology. Nevertheless, I guess it's a good story to tell the grandchildren one day, plus I did get the chance to Jet Ski.
On Friday, Lisa, Natalie and I planned to do something much tamer by booking a dolphin and whale watching boat trip, whilst Sophie and Hannah recovered from the night out they had had the night before after we had left them in Sparkles (the drag bar). It was a three hour trip, where we got to see dolphins in the wild, and there were loads of them! I'd only ever seen dolphins in the wild once before, in Florida when I was 7, so it was great to be able to see it again. I wasn't able to get any decent pictures of the dolphins though, trying to get a shot of dolphins when they're quickly jumping through the air was too much of a test for my poor photography skills! Then we all got the opportunity to jump off the boat into the sea for a spot of swimming, which Lisa did!
Our last night was spent finishing up the last of our tacky present buying, and having a bit of a final wonder around the area. Sophie and Hannah decided to go on one last night out, and didn't make it back until half an hour before the coach was coming at 3.55am to take us back to the airport. You'd think by now the drama would've all been over, right? Nope. The week had one last surprise for us.
We arrived at the airport and realised that everyone else had their boarding passes in hand. We were unable to print them before we went on holiday, and hadn't been able to since we got to Gran Canaria, so we felt assured that we would be able to get them at the airport, no problems. I mean, some people don't get access to the internet, let alone a printer, when they go abroad, and they must have something put in place to accommodate this. But nope. We were told that with no printed boarding passes, we were not going home. We were sent to the 'only' printer in the airport, and after I put in the last of my change, we discovered that it wasn't even working to begin with. Great. In a last ditch panic, we ran to the Ryanair desk to find out what we could do. They told us that there was a way we could make our flight (yay!)... by paying €70 EACH for them to print out our boarding passes for us (oh... not so yay). So bear in mind that as there were 5 of us, Ryanair managed to squeeze €350 out of us. Ouch.
So cue a last minute mad rush, where we had to queue up again for the main desk, to get a receipt of our flight (where they already had all our details and everything, so why did we need a piece of paper with it all on? Ridiculous), and then run to another desk to pay a stupid amount of money, before legging it back to the first desk again to finally check in our bags. Seems like a rush? By this point we had 5 minutes before check-in closed, which wouldn't have been such a problem if the woman serving us wasn't working at a snails pace. When we politely told her to speed up because we'd just paid all this money and might not even make it anyway, she told us she wouldn't serve us if we were rude, and went even slower. The check-in closed, but she kept going, and finally 10 minutes later, our bags were off. Now we only had 25 minutes until our plane was due to leave, and we still had to get across the airport and find our gate.
Shoes off, we ran through Las Palmas airport, dashed through security, and made it to the gate just as it was about to close. Because we were the last to check-in, we were all scattered around the plane, and were all in for a long flight home. I made friends with the Bristol family I was sat with, who found my holiday tales hilarious, and too were enraged about the cheek of Ryanair's extra charges. When we finally landed in Bristol, we were absolutely delighted to find that our bags had also made the flight, and we were relieved that we had actually made it.
(View from the plane, you can see Weymouth and Portland in the distance)
So there you have it. One action-packed, stress-filled week away. I have never come back from a holiday before, and felt like I needed to book another one to recover. The moral of the story, never fly with Ryanair, they will try and get as much money as they can out of you, whether you can afford it or not. Also, you will probably drown if you attempt to do any watersports. That taught me for trying to be active. Lesson learnt, it's much safer to be a coach-potato. But hey, I did see some dolphins! Plus, I do have loads of stories to tell from my week away, and for both good and bad reasons, it was certainly unforgettable.
Until next time...
Much love ♥
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