Summer Holiday

As in “we’re all going on a…”
A visit to Kendal’s oldest - and now only - travel agent this morning, firstly confirmed our fears of yesterday. There are no cruises available for our budget - at least, not to anywhere we want to go to or haven’t already been to.
So we threw ourselves upon his mercy and asked for suggestions. A series of questions then followed as to our likes and dislikes, budget, how long we wanted to be away for, where we wanted to fly from and what level of accommodation we wanted. Felt pretty drained after all that, but we’d narrowed it down to either Croatia around Split or Italy in Sorrento. Italy was more expensive, but there was potentially more to do - Pompeii, Vesuvius and Naples are all easy to get to.
Decided to have a think about it over lunch so left, promising to return later. After a bit more research of our own a plan started to come together. By changing the suggested departure date by a couple of days, we could get the hotel we liked in Sorrento, at a price within our budget and we would return to Manchester the day before we are due to attend events in that city. A cheap hotel in Manchester for the night (and possibly a show) and we’d be in the right place in the morning and would have avoided an early drive down from Kendal.
Definitely seemed like a plan, so we returned to the travel agent to get it all booked. I suppose that because we’d actually chosen a slightly different hotel and date to what he’d suggested, we could have just booked it ourselves, but that didn’t seem very fair, seeing as how he’d done all the leg work to get us to this point! A wise decision as it happened, as the travel agent used a discount voucher to get a bit knocked of the final cost!
So that’s it. The last week in September will see us enjoying seven nights half board in Sorrento. Our first proper holiday in five years and - for me, anyway - first time on a plane for about ten years. Mrs C has more of a jet set lifestyle than me and flew to India in 2018 and, more prosaically, the Hebrides earlier this year.
It did feel a bit strange booking a package holiday as the last one we had was some forty odd years ago! Everything since then was pretty much made up as we went along! But it will be nice being able to just enjoy the holiday without having to worry about the fine details.