Kate Hawkesby: Why holidays aren't all they're made out to be

Photo / 123RF

COMMENT:

For everyone stuck at home in the cold miserable wet weather for school holidays, playing endless games of cards with your kids and having FOMO over all the Instagram stories of people basking in sunshine, I'm here to tell you, there are downsides to travelling in the school holidays. It's not all sunsets and cocktails.

Don't get me wrong, we were ready for a break, and family holidays are fun, but travelling is exhausting, and it's more exhausting with kids in tow. Immigration queues, screening, customs, waiting for bags, sitting on tarmacs ... that part's not a lot of fun.

We went somewhere hot, but guess what? So did all the other Kiwis travelling. In fact, school holiday travel during July is up 25% over the past 5 years - it's jumped 5% a year.

So we shouldn't have been surprised that every second person we bumped into in the street or at the beach was a Kiwi. The embarrassing part about that is you're usually in your worst jandals, with the humidity frizz going in your hair, with your white toes, sweaty brow and sunburnt nose. Never a great look.

Downtime with the kids though means an opportunity to shop for the stuff you never get time to do at home. So you hit the Macy's sale and can't believe all the good prices, until you get to the counter and they add all the taxes on top of it, you swipe your credit card only to see the stomach-churning amount in NZ dollars with exchange rate the way it is, and suddenly you'll need a second mortgage to pay for all those hoodies.

The same happens at meal times. Feeding kids on holiday costs a small fortune and mainly consists of them saying they're "starving", but when the meal arrives and is bigger than their head, they get half way through and say, "I'm full". So most of the food you order isn't even eaten but you can guarantee they'll be hungry again in 15 minutes.

And while I'm on a food rant, why are breakfast timeslots at hotels so limited? If you're not awake, showered, dressed, and into the restaurant by 10.30am, you're not getting breakfast. I mean, you're on holiday, sleeping-in is the main focus of your entire break and yet there's this perpetual angst to wake up in time to get everyone ready and down to breakfast before it closes. I think we made breakfast twice in our entire week away.

I'm not complaining about a holiday of course, I'm just saying for those of you wishing you were on a beach somewhere, remember you get to have breakfast whenever you want, it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg, and you're not lugging bags anywhere or sitting around airports or missing cuddles with your dog.

Yes, it was nice to go away, but it's even nicer to come home.