The Holiday That Was Just Okay.

By Babette, Germany.

Babette went to Egypt hoping for a wonderful family holiday. She came home with a wobbly bed, an improvised cocktail, a stingray she couldn’t photograph, four massages and a firm belief that Egypt deserves another chance — just somewhere else.

Coming home from holiday is difficult enough. Coming home to three weeks of emails, orders and information waiting for you is another matter entirely.

By the time I was back at work, I already felt very busy again. Perhaps that made the holiday seem even shorter. When Janita asked me how Egypt had been, my first answer was simple: “It was too short.”

Then came the more complicated answer.

It was okay.

Not spectacular. Not terrible. Just a holiday with some really good moments, some disappointing ones, and quite a few things that made us think, Well, we won’t choose this particular place again.

The Hotel Needed Help.

Hurghada surprised me. There was rubbish beside the streets, unfinished or deteriorating buildings, rough pavements and traffic that felt very different from what I know in Germany. I would definitely not want to drive there myself.

Our hotel did not improve the first impression very much.

The room was normally meant for three people, but there were four of us, so an extra bed had been added. That made everything rather cramped. Worse, the legs of one bed were different heights, so when my son lay on it, the whole thing wobbled.

My husband solved the problem with a piece of paper under one of the legs.

Then the room was cleaned.

The bed moved.

The wobble returned.

Luckily, the piece of paper was still there, so our highly technical hotel-bed repair could be installed again.

If I had to write one sentence in a review, I knew exactly what it would be: the hotel urgently needs renovation. In fact, I did write that in my review.

But that is only half the story. The staff were very friendly and helpful. That was really great, and it mattered. It is possible for a hotel to need serious work and still have people inside it who make you feel welcome.

Unfortunately, the building was not our only problem.

Several of us developed stomach trouble during the holiday. I was first, beginning on the second evening, and it lasted for about two or two and a half days. Then my husband had problems, followed by my son. At one point, public health officials were at the hotel, and from conversations with other guests, we realised we were not the only people who had been unwell.

By then, the holiday was becoming rather different from the one we had imagined.

Porridge, Dates and a Better Dinner.

The food was mixed.

There was plenty of choice in the main restaurant: rice, potatoes, pasta, eggs, omelettes, beans, fruit and many sweets. There were even mini cupcakes at lunch and dinner. We could never have tried everything.

After my stomach problems, though, I found something safe and simple: porridge with sugar, cinnamon and a little coconut. I tried pancakes too, but porridge became my breakfast for most of the holiday.

I also tried a fresh date. I discovered that I still prefer dried dates, but at least I tried one.

The best dinner came at a sister hotel. It was beautiful there, the meal was very good, and I ate lamb — only the second time in my life that I remember having it. Our Italian restaurant, on the other hand, was okay, but I was not unhappy that we only ate there once.

Perhaps that is the best way to describe much of this holiday: there were good things, but they appeared between quite a lot of “okay.”

Even the cocktails followed this pattern.

There was no piña colada, so on our last day I attempted to create my own version. I had found a drink with pineapple, mango and coconut milk, and I suggested adding a little white rum.

The bottle that appeared was not white rum. It was brown.

I drank it anyway.

It was okay.

It was definitely not a piña colada.

Sometimes the Best Picture Is the One You Miss.

There were better moments away from the hotel.

The aqua park had a lazy river, a wave pool and plenty of slides. My husband tried seven or eight of them. I tried none.

He did persuade me to climb the stairs by telling me that I could take beautiful pictures of the view from the top. Once we were up there, he suggested that perhaps I could slide down too.

Nice try.

I went back down the stairs.

The beach was another mixture of beauty and disappointment. The reef near the hotel appeared badly damaged and we saw rubbish there too, but one day my daughter and I were coming out of the water when we saw a blue-spotted stingray.

I had no phone ready.

No photograph.

Just the stingray.

Earlier in the holiday I had been watching another guest at the buffet taking photographs of the food. My husband was standing there when she came along with her phone, intent on getting her picture. She did not even apologise for getting in his way. Apparently the photograph was very important.

I do take holiday pictures. My sister has even reminded me that I am not necessarily much better than my mother when it comes to putting photographs in my status. But I photograph my family and the places around us. I do not need to show everybody the buffet every day.

“That’s not my cup of tea.”

So perhaps there was something fitting about the stingray escaping my camera. I saw it. Hannah saw it. That was enough.

The Party Bus and the Boat.

On our first trip to the beach, we took the hotel bus.

The driver turned the music up loudly, and I decided that if we were on holiday, I might as well enjoy myself. I was having my own little party on the bus.

My daughter covered her ears.

“Mama! Mama!”

I suspect I was embarrassing her.

After that, we discovered that walking back to the hotel only took about ten or fifteen minutes.

Our boat trip brought another collection of good and disappointing moments. We had booked it partly because we hoped to see dolphins.

We saw no dolphins.

We stopped at a reef for what felt like a very long time. There was also confusion over which island we would visit, and when we eventually reached an island, we only had about an hour there.

Yet the boat also gave us one of the best meals of the holiday. The crew were a little crazy and great fun, and while the long stop became boring for some of us, the others found another form of entertainment: jumping from the boat.

My son had met another boy on the trip, and the two seemed to encourage each other. My husband jumped from the top deck, while my son tried a jump from the sun deck.

I was proud that he tried it.

The sad part was that the boys were staying in different hotels. Had they been in the same place, my son could simply have gone off to find his new friend and returned at lunchtime or dinner. We exchanged contact details with the other family, but our paths had already begun separating again.

That is another thing holidays do. You can travel thousands of kilometres and unexpectedly meet people who live surprisingly close to home.

Not the Last Time.

There were plenty of things I would change about this holiday. I would choose a different hotel. I would choose another region. I would hope for better food, a better-maintained resort and perhaps a boat trip where the dolphins actually receive the invitation.

But Egypt itself has not been crossed off our list.

“We think it was not the last time that we visited Egypt.”

Maybe next time we will try another part of the country. Maybe next year will be Turkey or Greece instead. We do not know yet.

And despite all my complaints, I did manage to relax in certain ways. I slept until half past seven or eight. I spent time in the water. I had four massages, although after the first one my back hurt so much that even a soft touch made me say, “Ow!” By the fourth, things were considerably better.

There was also my daughter’s excitement about flying. On our night flight from Cologne, she said goodnight, closed her eyes and then, about five seconds later, opened them again to look out of the window.

She was simply too excited to sleep.

And I came home pleased about something else. During the holiday, I had used my English. Back home, I spoke English with a neighbour too. After three weeks away, I worried that I might have forgotten the language. I had certainly forgotten plenty of words, but the words came back when I needed them.

Maybe that is how this holiday deserves to be remembered.

Not as the spectacular Egypt holiday we expected, and not as a disaster either. It was a wobbly-bed, porridge-for-breakfast, no-dolphins, brown-rum-in-the-cocktail kind of holiday, with a party bus, a brave jump from a boat, friendly hotel staff and a blue-spotted stingray that never made it into a photograph.

It was okay.

And sometimes “okay” makes a much better story.