When we booked a week in Tenerife back in November, the plan was simple.
Have a lovely holiday.
Come home.
Put my house on the market.
Simple, right?
Except life had other ideas.
By the time July rolled around, we’d sold a house, bought Everstead, survived months of solicitors, surveys, paperwork, packing, unpacking and enough stress to last a lifetime. The holiday we’d booked eight months earlier hadn’t become the start of our summer…
It had accidentally become our recovery.
Looking back now, I genuinely don’t think we could have timed it any better.
“We’re not really holiday people…”
If you’d asked either of us a year ago whether we were holiday people, I think we’d both have shrugged.
Joel’s previous holidays had mostly been because Lisa wanted to go away.
Mine had generally involved loading up the car and heading somewhere in the UK because that’s just what we’d always done.
Neither of us had ever really stopped to ask ourselves what our perfect holiday actually looked like.
Apparently…
It’s two books.
Some sunshine.
A decent cocktail.
And absolutely nowhere we need to be.
Who knew? 😂
It took us a while to stop…
One thing nobody tells you about living with months of stress is that you almost forget how to relax.
For the first day or two I’d catch myself thinking…
“Should we go somewhere?”
“Should we book something?”
“Should we be making the most of this?”
Eventually it dawned on me.
This was making the most of it.
We found our favourite spot by the pool almost straight away.
Joel happily sat in the sunshine.
I claimed the shade with my Kindle because I’ve finally accepted I’m basically part vampire.
That became our routine.
Breakfast.
Books.
The occasional swim.
Another chapter.
Maybe a frozen margarita.
Repeat.
It sounds unbelievably boring.
Honestly?
It was perfect.
Tuesday became our adventure day
I’d been looking forward to the Los Cristianos Market from the moment we’d booked the holiday.
I’d loved the markets in Turkey, and I knew Joel wanted to find some football shirts for football-mad Luca, so Tuesday morning we jumped in a taxi and headed over.
The market didn’t disappoint.
We wandered around for over an hour, picking up presents for the kids, browsing the endless stalls and generally enjoying ourselves.
Eventually it got absolutely heaving.
Now…
This is where I had what I thought was a brilliant idea.
“Let’s walk down to the harbour and make the most of the day.”
To be fair…
It was a brilliant idea.
The harbour was beautiful.
Crystal-clear water.
Palm trees.
Little cafés.
Exactly the sort of place you imagine when someone says Tenerife.
Then it was time to find the taxi rank.
Google Maps confidently informed me it was five minutes away.
Now, before I blame Google…
…it probably was.
If I could actually read a map properly. 🤣
What followed was me confidently leading us around Los Cristianos while repeatedly announcing, “It’s just round here.”
It wasn’t.
Poor Joel.
Eventually we found an actual taxi rank, laughed about my navigation skills and headed back to the hotel.
Looking back, it’s one of my favourite memories of the week.
Not because everything went to plan.
Because it didn’t.
We found “our” place
As the week went on we gradually migrated towards the Eden Pool.
It quickly became our happy place.
Joel in the sun.
Me in the shade.
Books open.
The occasional dip in the pool.
A swim-up bar dangerously close by.
We also treated ourselves to the thermal spa twice because we’d enjoyed it so much the first time.
I absolutely loved the hydrotherapy jets.
Watching layers of dead skin slough off afterwards…
Slightly less glamorous. 🤢🤣
Worth every euro though.
UTC
Every evening we’d wander over to UTC for the entertainment.
The bands were brilliant.
The atmosphere was brilliant.
And Antonio behind the bar became one of our favourite people.
Before long we’d walk over and he’d already know exactly what we’d be drinking.
Those tiny moments make such a difference.
One evening I was happily singing along to the live music when Joel looked across and smiled.
“You’re in your element, aren’t you?”
At the time I just laughed.
But he was right.
I was.
We learnt something we weren’t expecting
This holiday wasn’t just the longest time we’d ever spent away together.
It was the longest uninterrupted time we’d ever spent together.
We’d agreed to buy a house.
Planned our future.
Yet we’d never actually spent more than a couple of days where it was just us.
No kids.
No work.
No everyday life.
Just Sammie and Joel.
That probably should have been terrifying. 🤣
Instead…
It felt incredibly easy.
We could spend hours reading without speaking.
We could laugh at absolutely nothing.
We could sit in comfortable silence.
We didn’t need to constantly be doing something.
For one week we weren’t Mum and Dad.
We were just us.
And I’d forgotten how much I’d missed that.
Maybe we’ve been doing holidays wrong
By the final evening we realised something that made us both smile.
We don’t dislike holidays.
We’ve just never had our kind of holiday before.
Not one full of excursions.
Not one where every minute is planned.
Just one where we could slow down enough to remember what it feels like to simply enjoy being together.
At the time, I thought I’d just had a wonderful holiday.
I didn’t realise that what I’d actually found was something I’d been missing for a very long time.