Cracking Day had by all today.

After a decidedly luke warm first day, Thursday saw beautiful cloudless skies. It wasn’t too hot, but hot enough (28′C).

Last night, we had overused the a/c and needed a blanket and some mutual bodily warmth to survive the night. Pollards = wimps.

We were up at a very respectable 8.30am. Breakfast on the balcony – croissants, toast, freshly squeezed orange juice – lovely start to the day. Karen was in good form physically having just had a set of patches applied. Mentally she is great.

We had witnessed an awesome thunderstorm in the middle of the night. It was 50+ miles away (out to sea) – you could hear no thunder, but the frequency and intensity of the lightning lit up the storm clouds on the horizon – very impressive.

Once showered and changed we headed to the Gibbses. After a cup of tea, we prepared lunch (Terry mostly) and went to La Zenia beach. As usual, the beach merchants came round offering sunglasses, rattling stones etc…Then the Henna artists, followed by massers. This beautiful chinese lady came round and offered Nigel a full body massage. Nigel jumped at it and within seconds was prone, face down on his beach towel. The lady applied the lotion, and then did some unusual hand signals to her friend in the distance. Her friend was a chinese gentleman who unbeknowst to Nigel approached and continued the massage seamlesly. We all had a good snigger at the fact Nigel thought he was being massage by this Chinese lady.

She then offered me a massage. After some furtive glances around for lurking chinese gentleman and not spotting any, I said “yes”. The massage was lovely – very relaxing. At one point, when she was massaging my inner leg, she brushed by a testicle.

Lady :- “Excuse me”

dp :- “No, that’s fine”

It was the best bit, but unfortunately, it wasn’t that kind of a massage and with the wife less than a foot away, it was just as well.

Discussing the massages later with Nige, he remarked how he had found it strange that the woman’s voice seemed to fade into the distance while she was massaging him, at which point he had realized that it was no longer her massaging him. We all laughed. As Nigel himself pointed out, he wouldn’t have had a massage if he had known it was a bloke.

The sea was MUCH warmer than both the hotel pool and the villa pool, so we had a good splash around in that. kp stayed back with Terry, both of them discussing their dislike for sand/beaches. William paddled while Nige and I went for a swim and some bodysurfing.

By the time the swim was over, it was lunchtime (2pm), and we went upto the hotel to enjoy our sandwiches and beers. We stayed by the hotel pool for a while as Nige, Terry and William enjoyed the “big” pool.

The lads then played some tennis on the tennis court, with some balls that had virtually no bounce in them. It was tiring. Us old men can’t move around the court as quick as we used to be able to. William was a good ball boy and not a bad tennis player when he kept his eye on the ball.

Tennis over, the girls relaxed on the sun loungers while the blokes went back to the sea to build sandcastles and go back out to do some bodysurfing. William wasn’t keen at all on the sea and ended up coming back with Nigel (in tears).

At about 6pm, we all headed up to the hotel bedroom. The boys had showers to get all the sand off and then we drove to the villa. For the first time on the holiday, I didn’t drive. Terry offered to drive so she could memorise the route. As Karen got in the car, she gave me a look as if to say “Yikes”. This wasn’t ‘cos it was Terry, more that it wasn’t me. Although Terry didn’t help matters by saying she had never driven from the left seat again.

kp was quite quite scared.

It didn’t help matters when Terry……….

• couldn’t move the seat forward
• couldn’t start the car (was a button, no key)
• applied the brakes firmly all the time (they were harsher breaks than her car)
• went for the gearstick where there was no gearstick (left of her seat)
• couldn’t adjust the mirrot remarking “who needs to see behind anyway”
• approached roundabouts saying “which way round do I go”

Within 5 minutes, she was sound and she drove really well. I just know Karen was unnerved by every little thing that didn’t go smoothly.

Chinese night tonight. Nigel and I went for the chinese. On the way, we stopped at the pharmacy for some aftersun. We had all caught the sun. A gadgety-looking health machine caught his eye. For €1 it weighed you, measured your height, blood pressure, body fat index etc… Nige couldn’t resist. He lost his first €1 when it thought he was a woman. The lovely pharmacy man came over to assist and Nigel got his health check. When it came to my health check, Nigel did everything possible to distort my readings. At least I hope that is why my pulse was only 95 over 60.

We ordered our chinese and sat down for some prawn crackers and beers while we waited.

The meal was huge when we got it back to the villa and we could only eat about 2/3rds of it. By this stage, we were all knackered. Nige and I offered to wash up, which we duly did. Washing up isn’t a mentally taxing affair for Nige and I and in no time at all we were pretending to be robots on a production line (with all the relevant noises). He would wash and pass me the plates, and I would do the robot thing whilst I dried them.

Well, that’s when things got a bit out of hand. We were both laughing at our inane attempts at being robots, the laughing got worse and worse, until I was out of control and couldn’t stop laughing. This made Nigel worse, which made me worse etc etc… I had to leave the room and go out on the veranda. kp was laughing ‘cos I was laughing so much, ditto Terry. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop laughing and could see how people could die from laughing. Eventually I  stopped, but my sides were literally hurting !!

Cracking night !!! The weather forecast is great everyday until we return (Tuesday). Big thanks to Marie who is homesitting/dogminding !!!