Holiday highs and lows

tanith; that's just how I feel. Over the past few years we've combined a bit of eating out with cooking simple meals. I used to make quite an effort when we went oop north but realised that it was my only holiday of the year and I was cooking all the time [and putting on weight]so it's fish fingers and salad most nights with a couple of pub meals. I'd quite like to have a caravan holiday again one day. I used to love going the Crete and self catering with a meal in the evening; with it being so hot I never wanted to eat much anyway.

I love self catering we eat out at a different place most days and get to sample the different styles of restaurant. I'm not comfortable in hotels I always feel I'm being observed, much prefer the anonymity of self catering and how much cheaper it is. If we stayed in hotels we certainly couldn't afford 2/3 breaks each year. I don't mind if its just OH and I or family come along .

I have been doing both. I've always felt that self catering has to be top of the range and even then as kitty says there can be a dearth of sharp knives and
Instructions for idiosyncratic dishwashers. It has to be better than home is my golden rule. I can cope with the things my home throws at me but one year we stayed in a last minute booking in the Lakes. It was expensive and August but the place was covered in labels saying out of order. We took a couple of days to realise that things were breaking down around us and we gave up and went home. This year we went and inspected before we booked. We also took GC 2 to wales and booked a five star place. This was new and so high tech we had to keep phoning the owners to find out how things worked. We are going to the same place in July . We then feel we deserve our own holiday having done our duty so we had a cruise to somewhere we wanted to go and September we will plan our next adventure. My DH is talking Himalayas I am talking one of those trains to Jodphur and Jaisalmer. Beans on toast until Xmas .

The highs are when I get waited on hand and foot (i.e. a great hotel). The lows are when a holiday means more work for me (we go self catering somewhere remote) or we find ourselves on a tour with some annoying people!

I think self-catering is OK if you have young children. It makes everything so much easier and you can keep an ear out for them when they are in bed which you can't in a hotel so you have to stay in the room once they have gone to sleep. We did it a lot when ours were young but did eat out sometimes too.

When it is just DH and me we always stay in hotels, much better not to have to think about meals especially when it is a busy type of holiday.

We have had many more holiday highs than lows. Just one terrible hotel in all the years so not much to complain about.

I love self-catering. We eat out everyday.

Much as I love cooking, self-catering holidays drive me bonkers. The cooker etc is never as good as one's own, no dishwasher, there is no stock of herbs, salt and pepper, cooking oil etc etc etc, there is often a lack of decent knives, no colander, mixing bowls - oh, I could go on but, basically, no more self catering for me!