Sunny Spain
We stay around 20 minutes south of Alicante and, as we’ve been a few times before, the kids had a list of things they wanted to do again. I think we’d been in the villa less than half an hour before they were asking when we’d be going up to the pool (it isn’t a private pool and is positioned a couple of villas up the hill).
We had lots of days at the pool and the kids loved the dive sticks and spent hours retrieving them from the bottom of the pool! We took flippers and some skimming balls too which also kept the kids occupied! We also visited the beach which is around a 5-minute drive away. It’s a lovely sandy beach and although it can get busy with locals at the weekend, its generally pretty quiet at this time of year. The sea can be a little rough, but you can go quite a way out and it’s still relatively shallow, so we had fun playing in the waves. Their favourite activity at the beach is to dig a castle and then a huge hole in front of it (close enough to the sea that some waves will go in), then they absolutely love watching the water slowly erode the sand away and eventually taking their castle with it – it’s a full day activity and never disappoints when the final bit of castle falls in! We can never quite work out the tide there, it isn’t like at home, at times there seems to be a small one but just when you think it’s changing it goes the other way again so it’s much easier to do this there, than it would be back home!
Benidorm is around an hours’ drive from where we stay, and we sometimes take a day trip up. This year we decided to visit Mundomar which is a sea-life park as the kids love animals. I’d been with my hubby, Chris, long before we had children, but we hadn’t been as a family. It was a brilliant day and wasn’t overly busy, so we were able to do most of the shows twice. We also got our photos with a rather large sealion and a dolphin. The kids loved the dolphins and sealions and I think would have been happy just sitting at the window watching them all day! I’m still in two minds about whether it’s a good thing or not but they mentioned about plastic quite a few times and the kids really took it in – they have asked several times about plastic in the sea since we’ve been back and often ask if their plastic will end up there and they want to do their bit to help, so I guess if every child comes away with that view then that part at least must be a good thing.
We are also lucky to have a very local waterpark which we visited twice. This is still the kid’s favourite thing to do and they loved it just as much this year. Now that they are both competent swimmers for their ages, I think this year we were able to make the most of the facilities even more than usual. We all went on every one of the slides available (first time that’s happened!) and we all stood under the tipping bucket which Chloe has never wanted to do before (I’m not saying she enjoyed it but she was brave enough to try it once!)
It's amazing how much difference a bit of sunshine makes, so having come back to the rain the week after, we are counting down to the next holiday!