Alison Brant's Holiday Heaven and Hell


Alison Brant is a finance support assistant with QualitySolicitors Redkite, the biggest law firm in West Wales, who have seven offices in the area, including one in Carmarthen. Here is her Holiday Heaven and Hell (published in the South Wales Evening Post today).


My worst holiday
My worst holiday was back in the dim and distant past (thank goodness!). I hadn’t been married long and my (now ‘ex’) husband’s family always went to Barmouth in Mid Wales for their holidays because that was where all the ‘Brummies’ from Birmingham went to roost for their summer break.
At that time we lived in Burnley so we had travelled down to Walsall on the Friday night ready to set off all together the next morning. (My husband’s sister, brother-in-law and two children always came with us, too) Overnight our car was broken into and our suitcases were stolen.
Once in Barmouth, true to form, the weather was atrocious all week and to cap it all my ‘ex’ picked up a stomach bug. So there I was, trapped in a small static caravan for a whole week with five other adults, two small children and nothing to wear except the clothes I had travelled down in and a couple of things borrowed from my sister-in-law!
We did have subsequent holidays in Barmouth, which were much happier. But the motto of this experience was ‘Never take all your best clothes on holiday’.
My best holiday
Luckily, time moved on. The caravan, the husband and Barmouth holidays are all things of the past. I am now living with my childhood sweetheart (met again after 40 years) and life has improved no end.
My best holiday (and one which I never dreamt I would ever have) was a ‘Great Rail Journey’ trip across America from New York to San Francisco.
It took three weeks altogether, with short hotel stops along the way at some of the major cities such as Chicago, Denver, Flagstaff and Los Angeles.
We also had two overnight journeys on the train.
We saw a lot of the major sights including the Empire State Building, Central Park, Washington DC, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon.
It was a truly amazing experience
And the motto of this experience was ‘Everything comes to he (or she) who waits’.
Most memorable holiday moment
This was in the middle of the American trip. We spent three days in Denver in a hotel that used to be a Playboy Club and it had a roof-top swimming pool.
My most memorable moment of the whole trip was swimming in the pool in the early morning, watching the sunrise and seeing the Rocky Mountains in the distance and thinking how lucky I was to be there.

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