Holiday in Spain

We're just back from a week's holiday in the south of Spain, Costa del Sol to be specific. It's amazing that such tropical beauty is within a 2.5 hour flight from Dublin.

We book an all-inclusive holiday via Falcon Holidays, a large Irish travel operator owned by the UK's First Choice Holiday. First Choice, in turn, is owned by TUI, a large German travel conglomerate.

Our ride to Malaga, Spain:


We spent a full week at the Holiday Village Hotel complex - and it really is a complex. When complete (it first opened in 2004), it will feature 12 full hotel builings that will offer more than 10,000 hotel rooms, apartments and timeshare condos. Simply amazing!

The hotel features 8 pools, some with water slides, plus plenty of restaurants, bars, lounge areas, play areas for the kids, amongst others. Indoors, it has a full spa and gym - including indoor pool - a convenience store, laundromat, doctor's office, casino, game room, movie theatre. You name it. It was a pretty impressive complex.

You wouldn't need to leave the complex. But we did. We took the kids to the local acquarium, the extremely impressive Fuengirola Zoo, and, of course, the ocean and downtown Benalmadena to walk around.

With all the hotels and flights, the area is naturally popular with tourists from across Europe, but especially the UK and Ireland. In many cases, save for the weather, it felt like we hadn't left Ireland. You could pick-up a copy of the daily Irish newspaper, get a full Irish breakfast and visit one of many Irish pubs, with ease. Which in some ways is really too bad (especially the Irish breakfast), but it facilitates a lot of traffic between the countries.

Unfortunately, during the week we were there two airlines shut down; XL Leisure Group (the UK's 3rd largest tour operator) and Futura (a Spanish and Irish charter airline). This left thousands of tourists stranded. And many without a job. Thankfully we weren't impacted.

However, the airport was a total mess. It took us over an hour just to check-in. Thankfully the rest of the travel experience wasn't nearly as difficult. In an ode to US-style marketing, Marriott had their timeshare reps working the halls to induce people to come back and check their new hotel in Mallorca out. Go figure.

And now we're back to reality. It's been primarily rain since we came back. Surprise, I know. But it's always good to be home. And there was at least sunshine today, so you never know what might surprise you.

Good night.