A Day of My Life on Holiday

Most of my Day of My Life in Pictures posts so far have featured very normal, boring days, so for this month’s instalment, I thought I’d try documenting the first day of our holiday in Tenerife, in an attempt to mix things up a bit.

A word of warning here, though: if you’re reading this post thinking, “At last! A post where Amber actually DOES something for a change!” you’re destined to be disappointed, because it turns out I can be just as boring abroad as I can be at home. I know, it was a bit of blow for me, too. It also turns out that if sleeping ever becomes an Olympic sport, I’ll make the British team for sure, because I spent the majority of this holiday feeling a bit like I’d been drugged, and wondering how early I could justify going to bed. Guess I was even more in need of a holiday than I thought, huh? (I’m just going to pretend I can’t hear you over there thinking, “Yeah, and much more boring than WE thought, too!” Oh, shush…)

Anyway! Here’s my Sunday, March 6th 2016, in pictures…

I woke up at around 8am (Which was actually one of my later starts on this trip: when I’m at home I can barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings without at least three cups of coffee, but on holiday I’m always up bright and early, like a little kid on Christmas morning or something. I’d hereby like to submit these early starts into evidence as an excuse for all of those early nights I had, too, just FYI…), and headed out to the balcony to check the weather, which was reassuringly sunny: yay!

Naturally, I was eager to get out and start soaking up some of that sunshine, so I hit the shower, then spent approximately 7 hours trying to blow-dry my hair with one of those crappy “hairdryer-attached-to-the-wall” contraptions that hotels always have. You know the ones that make your entire head feel like it’s on fire, but don’t actually dry your hair? THAT.

This is a totally staged photo (YA DON’T SAY), and I have no idea why I even took it, because it’s not like you don’t know what a hairdryer looks like, is it? I like to be thorough, though, so I’m calling this one, “Woman With Hairdryer and Loo Roll in the Background”. I. Am. So. Classy.

Luckily Terry woke up at this point and dug the travel hairdryer out of his suitcase (I have an awesome travel-sized hairdryer, which I made Terry carry so I’d have some extra room for the 57 skirts I packed.) so I finished drying my hair, got dressed in this outfit, and then headed down to breakfast:

We were staying on an all-inclusive basis, which isn’t something we’ve ever done before, and, to be perfectly honest, it’s not something we’d ever really WANTED to do either, but it turned out to be the cheapest option by far, and as we were trying to do this trip on a budget, we decided to just go with it. It actually worked out pretty well, because we had all of the facilities of the hotel available to us, but were still able to eat out whenever we fancied, so we got the best of both worlds, really. This, however, was the same hotel that one Trip Advisor reviewer had commented that “all inclusive was a misdemeanour” in, so I naturally couldn’t WAIT to see what it would be like:

As it turned out, the misdemeanors were all mine that morning, because while I was scanning the breakfast buffet and trying to decide what to have, I stupidly took a step back, right into the path of an oncoming waiter, who had to swerve to avoid me. I didn’t barge into him, or cause an accident of any kind, and I apologised immediately, but the waiter was NOT happy, and I was treated to a quick rant, all in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but luckily for me, the man made clever use of the universal language of eye-rolling and angry hand-gestures to effectively communicate that I was the stupidist stupid who ever stupided, so I quickly grabbed my breakfast and slunk off in shame, to join Terry at a sunny table by the pool:

Unfortunately for us, that sunny table by the pool just so happened to be in the FORBIDDEN section of the hotel (Well, it was FORBIDDEN during breakfast, anyway…). We only discovered this fact when my unhappy waiter friend discovered US, and again, was NOT HAPPY. We were treated to another annoyed rant, and more eye-rolling, and I left the breakfast area with two misdemeanors to my name, and a new Mortal Enemy, whose name I will add to the list of Mortal Enemies which I keep on my phone, for ease of reference.

(I’m joking: I carve the names into a piece of rock, so I never forget them.)

(No, I really AM joking: I hate that I have to say that, but someone thought I was being 100% serious in my introduction to this post last week, when I said I had only just realised you could wear different tops with a black skirt, so I feel the need to clarify…)

(I also feel the need to add that all of the other staff in the hotel were absolutely lovely: it was just that one guy who’d have happily seen me dead, and to be fair, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t me specifically he hated, it was ALL PEOPLE. C’est la vie.)

Anyway! So, we had breakfast, then we decided to head out for a wander, to get our bearings, and also to re-acquaint ourselves with the area. We’ve stayed in Costa Adeje before, but not in this particular part of it, so we set out on foot, hampered only slightly by the fact that I had to stop every few minutes to take photos:

We walked for a few hours, stopping once for ice cream:

Once for coffee:

(The Others were very interested in us at this beachside cafe, and instead of the usual staring, one woman kept openly pointing at me, and then turning to speak excitedly to her husband, while gesturing towards me. I’d like to think she was saying, “OMG! Is that FOREVER Amber?!” but I think it’s more likely that my Mortal Enemy the waiter had circulated my photo on some kind of Interpol-for-hotels site, and she was wondering whether she should warn the cafe owners about me…)

And once for a new trenchcoat for me: because no, I do NOT have enough trench coats: what are you, crazy?

By this point we’d done 16,000 steps, according to my Fitbit, so we decided to head back to the hotel and relax by the pool for an hour or so before dinner. The sky had gotten a little overcast, though (which is why I’ve layered up in the photo above), so rather than changing into our swimsuits, we decided to just grab our books/Kindle from the room and sit by the pool bar for a while:

One of the advantages of the all-inclusive option: free cava. Well, it would’ve been rude not to, huh?

We read until it was time for dinner which, as it was our first night, and we were pretty tired after all that walking, we decided just to eat in the hotel. I promise we don’t normally travel to Spain only to eat pizza n’ pasta, but I was shattered by this point – like, almost-falling-asleep-at-the-table level tired – and Terry wasn’t much better, so we just took the easiest option available:

(I had one more misdemeanor up my sleeve here, which was to seat myself in another FORBIDDEN area for this meal. You’d think I’d have learned, huh?)

I’d like to say I managed to pull myself together after that, and went out clubbing, or bar hopping, or whatever it is people normally do on the first night of a holiday, but I’m just going to be honest and admit that all I wanted to do was sleep, sleep, and then maybe catch up on a little sleep. Honestly, I’d been REALLY stressed before we flew out (actually, I’d been really stressed since around about Christmas time…) and I think it all must have caught up with me at the same time, because I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. I’m actually considering myself lucky here: normally when I’ve been super-busy/super-stressed for a while, I find that as soon as I take a break, I instantly get sick. This time I only got really, REEAAALLLY tired, which isn’t so bad, all things considered. So, rather than hitting up all those bars, we popped to the supermarket next to the hotel to stock up on water and other supplies…

(Most exciting photo on my blog EVER, srsly…)

… then we drank coffee on the balcony for a while, before getting an early night. Aaand, naturally I forgot to take any photos at all after that “water” masterpiece above (there comes a point in every ‘Day of My Life in Pictures’ post where I completely forget I’m supposed to be documenting things, and the whole thing comes to an abrupt halt), so here’s another one of the pool instead:

And so ends another Day of My Life in pictures….