My mum won her second holiday through quiz magazines sometime last year and asked if me and Emma wanted to join her and Tim on it as it was for 4 people. There was a problem as it was during term time and we didn’t actually know where and when exactly the holiday would be until up to 6 weeks before it was confirmed. We were told it was to be either Malaga or Tenerife and we had to pick our most ideal weeks available during the year and send them off and would be told at a later date the details for the holiday.
When it came back, we had been given Malaga and a week in March, which wasn’t a problem. I cleared it with my boss and we jetted off together for a nice weeks break. On a personal note, things hadn’t been fantastically brilliant between Emma and me. I think things like money and time spent together actively doing different things affected our relationship but also had started to get the feeling that things between us had changed and we had started to grow apart. I had considered life apart from her for a while but with the holiday coming up thought about giving it one more go.
In all fairness, the holiday was really nice. We got on really well and I got the feeling that things could improve between us. It was also good to spend some close time with my parents, who I’d not really seen much of since moving out nearly 2 years ago.
The apartment we were in was very smart on a nice resort but there wasn’t much of a beach near by and the resort was kind of in between two main towns so there wasn’t actually anything within walking distance from the resort. It was quite lucky that we had decided to hire a car before we arrived and we spent a lot of time travelling on the holiday.
The weather stayed really nice throughout the break, not a drop of rain and we did a lot of different things in such a short space of time. We ate at a different place almost every day both on the resort and off it and went to different bars in the towns each night. During the day we also travelled to different places to do different things.
Having looked at where we were located, I was keen to find the nearest large city, or in my words, the biggest football ground close to us. Barcelona and Madrid were miles away so I was out of luck with them but Seville was only about 2 hours drive from us. I managed to talk everyone into going there for a day later in the week and we decided to go on the Thursday. I spent the majority of the week looking forward to going there and then on the day before we were due to go I found a book on Seville in the local shop and the city looked really crap so I thought it was pointless going all that way just to see a ground. I could sense no-one else was actually that fussed about us going anyway.
We did go to plenty of other places though such as Gibraltar and Marbella. They were fun, especially seeing just how English Gibraltar is. I knew it was an English owned place but I still thought they’d follow the Spanish lifestyle but how wrong could I be? As soon as you cross the border from mainland Spain into Gibraltar and even go through passport control, suddenly every thing is as English as the queen. We spent the majority of the day there, driving up the rock much to Emma’s disgust as it was a bit steep and she wasn’t at all impressed at us going higher and higher. It was also cool to be able to see Morocco really clearly over the water from the top too.
The town we stayed in, Mijas, was close to two quite large towns called Fuengirola and Benalmadena. We ventured into these towns a couple of times near the end of the holiday and had some really nice meals there, including at one restaurant where I had the biggest mixed grill I had ever seen, followed by an absolutely enormous pancake. Heaven! Whilst walking along the town front one night we came across an English Sports bar, which generally wouldn’t’ve appealed to the women in the pack but the full scale replica Champions League trophy was too much to lure us in! We met the owners of the bar and spent the majority of the night chatting with them. They were scousers, but were bluenoses. I spent nearly all night hanging onto the trophy and trying to find the best way of getting it home, without any luck!
During a couple of the days in these towns we strolled along the promenade where many open restaurants competed to bring in the custom. This got quite annoying being approached by every Johnny Foreigner but there was one guy we really liked called Eduardo. He was a Romanian and didn’t try to more or less shove us into his place. We decided we would come back and eat at his place. When we did, he noticed my Liverpool shorts as well as my Milan shirt I had purchased that day and we spoke a lot about football. He was passionate for European football and was a big fan of Real Betis. We ate at his a couple of days in a row and chatted about football a lot. On our last day he asked us to go see him as he had a surprise for me. He gave me a Betis scarf and we exchanged email addresses.
The holiday was cool all in all. I enjoyed chauffeuring my parents around Spain as well as being away from work during term time in the sun. We went on the beach for an hour on the last day and that was the only time we spent on it in the entire week. It was more of a travelling holiday as we went from town to town. My main aim whilst I was over there was to find a real Barcelona shirt, which I did on the first day but that day I ended up getting a real AC Milan shirt. One of the reasons were they were likely to be coming up against Man United in the near future so I could wear it once they stuffed them, which they did. You’ll read about that later! I am also fond of Milan, especially after the magic of Istanbul so it was also a coincidence that I ended up going to watch them play in Athens just a couple of months from now. I did get the Barcelona shirt the day before we left from a market. No.10 Ronaldinho on the back and for about €30 less than I nearly bought it for originally. I also got a real Spain shirt with Raul #7 on the back for just €1 on the market.
Check the photo album for this holiday here
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