Sorry, I've been away.
They say you should never start off a piece of work with an apology, so I’m sorry for starting this one off with an apology that it’s been so long since I last pulled my finger out and blogged away. I know that both of you who read this have been pestering me for a while now. Rest assured my rambling prose is back.
I did draft a blog for the February trip to Acapulco but it was really, really dull. So dull that I was bored reading it myself and after the mobile phone blog I thought I could do much better. Aside from the incredibly dull mobile phone post and a cameo one I did from the phone, it’s been six weeks since I let you know what was going on in the world of Andy. I’ll do my best. Promise.
One thing I couldn’t mention before the event was our holiday to Acapulco. The folks tend to visit there quite a bit in February and it was their ruby wedding anniversary whilst they were there. My dad thought it would be nice to fly Stuart, Karen & I out there as a surprise for my mum.
We had it all planned out, we would get there late on Friday night and sneak quietly into the hotel. On the Saturday morning my dad had arranged a surprise champagne breakfast and the idea was that Stuart and I would don a couple of the hotel’s waiter uniforms and see how long it took my mum to cotton on.
The Hyatt in Acapulco has 640 rooms, it was full when we were there so I guess there were about 1000 guests in the hotel. What are the odds therefore of bumping into my mum in the lift on the way down to breakfast? I suppose the surprise element still existed but there were a lot of people that went to a hell of a lot of effort, and a lot of that went to waste. Stupid lift.
That still left us with a week in Acapulco to kick back and let all the pressures of unemployment wash away (Stuart also formally joined the dole queue whilst we were away), it was also good for Karen who was (and still is to some extent) getting over a nasty bout of glandular fever.
The most dramatic aspect of this trip was that Bastard Airways lost both Karen’s and my luggage on the outward trip. Some people would have let this ruin their holiday, after all the majority of people in this world aren’t happy on holiday unless they’re complaining about something. We merely got on with it.
The good news is that it turned up after five days but that still left us with £100 each courtesy of BA to see us through. There’s no doubt whatsoever that we could have stretched this a bit but the challenge of living for five days with the clothes on your back and £100 whilst trying to enjoy your holiday. This includes, getting some shorts/shirts/bikinis/flip-flops/sunglasses/sunscreen etc for around the pool, some clothes you’d be happy to wander out at night in and, of course, stuff to keep you from smelling really bad. I suppose we were helped that Stuart’s suitcase turned up so we had access to toothpaste and an unnecessarily large bottle of shampoo. I’ve just about done my letter to BA, I’ll be sending it off this week. It’s another in my classic compilation of ‘Andy’s Whingeing Letters’, copies on request.
A highlight of the holiday was meeting so many of the folks who my parents have become close to over the last four or five years however we only briefly met the man who has become such an inspiration to many, Uncle Stephen Saltzman, the man behind 95% of the emails that get forwarded on and the reason why bandwidth use over the internet has trebled over the last two years.
Shortly after Acapulco it was my birthday, where else were we supposed to go other than the legendary Raz. Again details are sketchy so click here and let the pictures tell the story.
The only sensible thing to do after that was to book a last minute ski holiday with Stuoobs and Easty. The deals weren’t quite as good as we expected but we ended up with a week in Alpe d’Huez. We were told that it wasn’t the prettiest of resorts and, to be honest, I was quite sceptical of how good it will be.
As it turned out it was quite possibly the best week’s skiing I have ever encountered. So much so that it’s prompted me to take a very hard look at the reasons why Karen and I wake up every morning to look out of our gorgeous apartment to be faced with Greater Manchester’s biggest building site (currently 16 cranes). Watch this space on that.
Everything went right; the hotel was spot on, the reps were great fun, the weather was puuuuuuurrrrrrrfect and we found a bar that you would have thought was designed with us in mind.
As ever with these kind of things we ended up at one with the bar; Stuoobs and Easty were pouring the drinks and I was in charge of the music. It ended up like this every night and we were several gins to the good singing power ballads with Jimi the barman. The conversation would then generally turn to me demanding that the owner, Ant, sell me the bar at a reasonable price. I think another couple of days and I would have used my awesome Michael Page taught negotiating skills to break the man, “Oh go oooonnnnnnnnnnn!”
I really don’t want to waffle on too much as things could get really dull so I’ll leave you with this slideshow of the phenomenal skiing and tubing conditions…
I wont leave it so long next time.
Andy
xxx
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