MAYBE you have your family holiday booked already. Maybe you're staying home this year or maybe you're like me, and haven't decided either way. But one thing is for certain, holiday season is almost upon us.
This time of year is a bit like Christmas, the pressure is on to do something, go somewhere. Everyone I talk to is going somewhere, doing something, wanting to shake off the shackles of the last few years and I can feel the pressure mounting. But we are still grappling with this cost of living malarkey and a week's worth of groceries costs as much as a spa break these days, a month's petrol would buy me a flight to New York.
Trying to find somewhere on the planet that would appease a fussy Belfast man, three teenagers and a tween with completely different interests and myself is a task that would send anyone running for the hills. It's nearly impossible.
Orlando did the trick a few years back, but I haven't got a tree in the garden that grows actual money or gold bullion to sell, so that's a 'no' for this year. So the hunt for a reasonably priced utopia that will suit everyone continues.
Back when we were kids, everyone I knew went on their holidays to Donegal, Sligo or Portrush. There was none of this Italy and Spain stuff. It seemed that only the rich people did that type of thing. The rest of us made do with a wet week in a caravan in Bundoran. We were doing staycations before they were even cool.
When we were young we visited every county in Ireland. We camped in forests, we stayed in rental accommodation, we booked into B&Bs and we had experiences that we still laugh about today, decades later.
Even 40 years on, we still talk about staying in an old cottage in Mayo that sounded lovely in the description but would most certainly have breached the product description rules. The advert really should have said 'condemned'. It certainly was quiet and secluded, it was simply miles from any kind of civilisation at all and looked totally abandoned and also very haunted. It was something directly out of a horror film.
My mother had to cook stew over a campfire while my father reconnected the electricity. My sister told me that the previous owner had died on the bed I was to sleep in. My younger brother jumped on said bed propelling a plume of ancient presumably corpse dust right into my face, triggering an asthma attack and a visit to a rural A&E. Fun times were had by all.
On another staycation, my brother broke his leg and on another he knocked himself unconscious. My sister managed to lock herself in the bathroom of a shower block for six hours and needed rescued out of a window via a ladder. My other brother cut his foot badly on broken glass and required stitches.
Between asthma attacks, cuts and broken bones one could be forgiven for thinking that we were some manner of freaks who liked to spend our summer holidays sampling and reviewing the delights of each county in Ireland's accident and emergency departments.
My friend remembers a staycation in Sligo when she was around 10, sitting in a field in a sweltering cramped caravan watching her family of six fall victim to horrendous norovirus during an Irish monsoon.
She remembers they went absolutely nowhere except to the tiny caravan bathroom. They changed this up to go to the caravan window to watch their sick, greenish father stagger across the field in biblical rain to get to the chemist in town for medication. They all went home on average a stone lighter. She has never stepped foot in Sligo since.
Nice, normal, expensive foreign holidays don't give you memories like that. They don't even come close. Save your money and give your kids cool memories.
I say let's go forth, embrace the madness, absorb the hilarious, vivid and priceless memories that only staycations can conjure up. Wherever you go, enjoy.
