Best and Worst Holidays – Liberty on the Lighter Side

Next up in my Best and Worst Holidays series comes from Liberty who blogs at Liberty On the Lighter Side.Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side

We haven’t had one outstandingly terrible awful holiday, yet, but we’ve had holidays with dreadful moments. I tend not to photograph those moments to post on Facebook although I did write about that on my blog here. Strangely enough those bad moments all depend on who you ask in our family because the children and adults have totally different opinions about what those moments were.

For example, if you were to ask the grown-ups, we hate camping in the pouring rain. My husband is still suffering from the trauma of a trip to Galway when he spent six miserable hours trapped in a small tent with our four young children and no car while mummy (me) swanned off to a wedding with my sister (and the car) to eat lovely food and drink nice wine with grownups. I’m not sure how it was all that bad for him to be honest, at least he was able to order pizza deliveries to ‘the first wet blue tent on the right hand side’ in a soggy field in Salthill. The children thought it was GREAT, camping is ALWAYS fun when you’re a kid and especially when beans on toast is upgraded to takeaway pizza. YAY!

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Drying out the tent!

I also don’t have very fond memories of all those holidays (lost count) where we’ve had to  either take a child to the doctor, or the car to a mechanic. Holidays are surely only meant to be plain sailing and pain free?

On the other hand. there are a few holidays that stand out as our unanimous favourites. One is to a campsite especially designed for children in Brittany, France (yet again in a tent). There was an over abundance of pools and waterslides, but it wasn’t blisteringly hot.

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
2 Fountains Pool

This is important point actually, we had a big tree to shade our tent. We’ve camped in hot places (Vendée, France as well as in the Pilanesberg, South Africa) without shade and I’d rather be dead than boil alive like that again. The avenues in this campsite were quiet for safe cycling and our neighbours played badminton with the kids. It was bliss! I read books by the pool side while the kids and hubby splashed about for hours until lunch, and then back again to the pool for even more strenuous relaxation all afternoon. I still dream about that deep sleep I had every night, all week. 

Another was to the Isle of Skye. In every way a total opposite to the commercialised campsite holiday scene, this was remote and rugged. There were no discos, karaoke or bars. There were barely any people! The landscape awed us at every turn, we swam in the icy sea, built dams in the burn and walked for miles, catching a fleeting glimpse of a couple of shy stags before they turned tail over the hills. We stayed in a self-catering house that had its own private cove and plenty of room inside for the kids to play table tennis on the damp days.

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Enjoying the sunshine on the Isle of Skye.
Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Building a Dam

Really what we love best is visiting family back in South Africa, partly because it’s so familiar, but also because it’s so different to life in Ireland. We love spending time with cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and we also love eating seafood cooked over the coals out under the stars on warm evenings, stroking giraffes, antelope or ostriches and playing on soft sand beaches that stretch for miles. We can’t rave enough about a holiday in South Africa!

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Feeding Nyala
Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Beach Tergnietsa

No two of our holidays have been the same and we are always open to new experiences. Meeting new people and experiencing their culture, language and food is one of the highlights always so we’ve house swapped six times around Europe as well as South Africa and this coming summer we are planning to ‘Couchsurf’ our way around the USA. (I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!)

Since having our kids, holidays have certainly been more frenetic, more fun, more exhausting and hilarious. We’ve done fewer ‘adult’ things and have enjoyed the ‘sillier’ kiddie things. Travelling is never dull. Even the painful moments change us, make us more resilient to the next incident. At the least, the terrible disasters make for great stories afterwards. In my mind, travel is not always just about having a holiday, it is about being changed in your outlook on the world. When you return home after a trip, you are never the same person who left home.

John Steinbeck says, “Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality temperament, individuality and uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us.”Travels with Charley

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side
Liberty and her family

Liberty is a mother of four kids living in Wexford, the sunny South Eastern corner of Ireland, but was born in the UK and raised in South Africa. She and her family get about a bit and usually avoid having ‘normal’ holidays.Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side

Thanks to Liberty for sharing Why not check out Liberty’s blog. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook. We’ve never camped with BattleKid yet, but I’m sure we will. I do remember a very wet, soggy end to a week at the Isle of Man TT. It was so bad that my husband I booked into a hotel for our last night because we couldn’t take the rain anymore!

And if you would like to feature in my Best and Worst Holidays series on the blog, please send me an email at bm@battlemum.com.

Best and Worst Holidays featuring Liberty on the Lighter Side. In this post, Liberty shares her stories about what holidays haven't been great and which ones have!

 

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29 thoughts on “Best and Worst Holidays – Liberty on the Lighter Side”

  1. Love the fact that Liberty and her family enjoy, as you put it, ‘unusual holidays! Certainly makes for some amazing adventures and some great memories. I need to take B camping…!

    Kat x

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  2. Don’t tell Liberty’s husband that I laughed out loud at the idea of him being stuck in a soggy tent with four children. Camping in the rain is fun for the kids but not so much for the grown-ups! I’m enjoying this series Cath. Great to hear about other people’s holiday experiences.

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  3. Love the soggy camping tale!! Can’t imagine what it would be like to be stuck in a wet tent with four children, but I bet you were relieved to be the one at the wedding!!!

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  4. We love camping, but have had a few wet tent experiences too. Once we were camping and rained all weekend and so as I was close enough to my mums, I took us all there for a shower / bath and some warmth. We would love to go to South Africa, it sounds amazing 🙂

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  5. I love this serious so much and you have just made me miss South Africa. I really can’t wait to go back. We’re hoping to in December, so fingers crossed. My fiancees family live there and honestly, it’s so beautiful, I keep begging him to book to visit them. The soggy camping trip sounds horrendous! I’m glad you’ve had some equally good holiday memories too! x

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    • Oh wow, I didn’t know you had links to South Africa. I lived there until I was nine and am really hoping to go back next year with my hubby and family to visit Kruger.

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  6. This is such an fun series! We LOVE camping – but my best holiday was Cruising with Disney – and my worst was Alcudia in Spain, as we were robbed! I’d love to visit South Africa though – that always sounds amazing from anyone you speak to who’s been there!

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  7. Totally agree! It’s just different perspectives we camped in a yellow weather warning and their were guide ropes and tents flying everywhere! The morning afterwards we heard people had abandoned their during the night (it was at a festival) My folks hated it, the howling wind and the tent shaking. I loved it! Definitely an adventure we’ll remember x

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  8. I always like reading other people’s experiences as we have had some shockers and some great ones too and it’s nice to know we are all in the same boat more or less!

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  9. Oh goodness the camping story, I would have definitely wanted to be at the wedding! The South Africa photos look amazing such a beautiful place x

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  10. It’s it funny how children remember things differently – I would of loved to have camped in the rain with pizza when I was younger (probably still love it now too lol). That campsite in France looks amazing, lovely pools and yay to camping in South Africa – have done the same and it was amazing

    Laura x

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  11. I love travelling with the kids as they see things that sometimes us adults just walk past and ignore. It can definitely be a challenge at times though

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  12. I love that Liberty’s husband ordered pizza to his tent. That’s probably the only thing that would get me camping, the promise of hot pizza haha!

    Katie xoxo

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  13. we really want to go to France this year and explore, so I was happy to see that your trip was amongst the favourite ones.

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