An ode to the festive holidays of the past

If you had asked me about five years ago what my favorite vacation ever was, I would have told you how in love I became with California. And how amazing Lloret de Mar was. Yes, seriously. I'm still not joking about that: this vacation still ranks very high in my top ten. You can probably imagine my disappointment when I recently received an email with a press release stating that Lloret de Mar now wanted to focus more on hiking holidays. Uh, excuse me? Lloret should focus on dancing in St. Tropez and shots of tequila for 80 cents. We didn't hike there, we stumbled.

The following year I went to Mallorca, El Arenal (I did enjoy those classy vacations) and that was also very successful, although we found the nightlife a bit disappointing compared to Lloret at the time. And now that summer is approaching again, I had to think back to these kinds of vacations: I secretly miss that.

Because how wonderful is it to know that your only goal for the coming week, or weeks, is to just go all out every night? Maybe you even printed shirts with your friend group on them, or just ‘Lloret de Mar’ with the year on it. Those kinds of things are just fine, you wouldn't even get weird looks for it. Try doing that in a trendy beach club in Bali.

And then those vacation loves. Personally, I was head over heels for one of the tour guides from Beachmasters (the organization we were with) and I was so wonderfully naive to believe that I was really his only summer fling. Side note: he was there for about three months. Spoiler alert: I was not his only summer fling. The tour guides, the promoters, the bar staff, those were the types we dreamed of.

By now, I am officially too old to go back to such a place, but I seriously find it somewhat regrettable. Coming back paler than when you arrived, living from hangover to hangover and from McDonald's to McDonald's, but it didn't matter: you were still young. Falling in love so much that you lie in bed at home with a stomach ache from homesickness. By the way, I've never had that again afterwards. Seriously: I wanted to go back to Lloret so badly that it made me cry.

But well, maybe it's for the best that these kinds of vacations are no longer on my agenda. Everything was better back then. Also that tour guide, by the way, because I later ran into him in Amsterdam, and without his status as a Beachmaster, I found him disappointingly boring.