Do you take friends with you when you go on holiday?
I wonder how many people spend part (or all) of their holiday with friends? Looking back over my lifetime, I have only had one holiday completely on my own – it was ok, but I took a while to adjust to it. But mostly I have either spent vacation time with my husband or my family.
We run a little shop in Helensburgh; it used to be the case that we went to a trade show in Aviemore to do our buying for the shop. This was in October each year for three or four days. Our plan used to be to add a few days on to the end of this to have a holiday, because the Aviemore area is really beautiful and peaceful at that time of year. We stayed in a couple of bed & breakfasts for the first couple of years. They were comfortable and hospitable – but we found that they didn’t quite meet our needs at that time.
When you walk round a trade show (especially when you’re new to business), you find yourself looking at absolutely every stall, picking up mountains of leaflets and price information. But then – how do you cope in the evening with sorting out the potential suppliers to see the next day? There was never quite enough room in the b&b to spread ourselves about and really sort out our selections. Eventually we decided that we would find a holiday cottage for our October adventure in Aviemore.
We invited a couple of friends to stay with us at various times – and found this worked really quite well. One year we had three guests – a couple of good friends as well as one of the distributors who regularly supplied us with Scottish crafts. That year, we had a lovely house which had an open fire in the lounge. I think we were all impressed at the coziness of the house and the great atmosphere we had generated (ok, it might have been wine induced!). However, Jim, the distributor, was sleeping on the sofa bed in the lounge. When we asked him the next morning if he slept well – he said that he had a great night’s sleep once the room cooled down – before that he had been “cooked” by the glowing embers of the fire!
It was a good year!
Posted in Villa Holidays