Sunday, April 13, 2014

The Happy Delusions Of A Holiday...


IMAGES : THE MOTHER LOAD | The Happy Delusions Of A Holiday


How good are school holidays when you actually get to go somewhere?!

We're home from a long overdue family trip to one of our favourite places, Noosa.

(Or 'Noooooisa' if you're a bit of a hoity toity).

Noosa! The place where you check your Melbourne blacks in at the door, head straight for the nearest bathing suit store and purchase the brightest, happiest, most overpriced beach dress you can find followed immediately by a stop at the pharmacy for a vat of tan in a tub.  Hooray! Holidays!

In Noosa, thongs are the only required footwear and melty, drippy ice-cream is a compulsory menu item at least once a day. The short walk from the pool to the beach becomes the daily routine and it allows JUST enough time for at least one child to melt down about the heat/ distance/ hunger/ stinging salty eyes. Thankfully, the ice-cream shop sits squarely in the middle of the two destinations so a crisis is generally averted by a bribe. The much sought after ice-cream is a great short term plan, and you do it with regularity, sometimes multiple times a day because after all it's holidays and the prospect of juvenile diabetes or a sugar coma is of course, non-existent in paradise.

Throughout the week, almost everything revolves around the day's menu and permission to gain back all the weight I've shed in recent months is granted (by me) and fully encouraged (again, by me).  Interestingly, now I'm home my jeans seem significantly tighter but I'm suitably convinced that it is of course because I've recently tumble-dried them not because I've eaten my way through the entire menu at every beachside restaurant in our happy holiday place.

A sunny, warm location has the amazing ability to completely reset your usually-conservative taste in clothing, especially in Noosa where every second shop is a clothing store. Never have I looked so good in fluorescent colours than in a shop bathed in warm sunlight and completely devoid of black. Yes! I'll take that bright orange sarong, and please throw in the hot pink bikini! See how it shows off my 'natural' tan and makes me seem more slender in the sun's golden glow? This will SURELY be the case when I return home, won't it? Yes is the answer with which I enthusiastically reassure myself and I'm of course backed up by the size six, gold lamé-wearing, leathery saleswoman. The reality is (as I'm reminded now that I'm home) I have a special drawer reserved for all the gaudy beach crap I've invested in over the years; it's brimming with unnatural colour, it isn't at all slimming, and it accentuates my southern state pastiness perfectly. Yay for hasty holiday decision-making.

Nonetheless, in amongst all the happy holiday delusions of multiple ice creams, general over-indulgence, and overpriced impractical outfits, a family getaway is brilliant especially if they are as few and far between as ours seem to be. Nothing beats a break from stress, routine and most of all those goddamn school lunches.

So wherever you choose to spend these hols, I hope yours are happy and a little deluded too. After all, what happens on holidays, stays on holidays so let loose, live a little and remember -  there will always be stretchy pants with an elastic waist, when you return home.




4 comments :

  1. Eating is the best part of any holiday. I took my babies to Noosa for a holiday when they were little and we had a wonderful time. Glad to hear you did too :)

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    1. It truly is eaters paradise, Pinky! Having said that, I can gorge myself pretty much anywhere. ;) xx

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  2. I love Noosa and will be heading there for 5 glorious days in the next couple of weeks … can't wait!

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    1. Enjoy, Sandie! I hope we left enough ice cream for you......xx

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