Corfu May 2010 Part 1

Corfu May 2010 Part 1

Well as primarily this blog is ostensibly for travel as well as my own wittering on about life in general, maybe time to switch on and develop some thoughts on places we have been to.

In 2010 the Sunni lady decided at last it was time to see some of Europe whilst I was working for a major Saudi Company. Over the last couple of years she has been to more places than in her whole previous life and is now becoming a reasonably confident traveller.... though not without the sleeping pills for flights over 3 hours!

She decided I think by putting a pin in a map blindfolded to go to Corfu. Easy I hear you say. Well in most circumstances yes, however as I was travelling fairly constantly she had based herself in The Netherlands. That way we could see more of each other. So off she toddled to the local branch of Thomson’s..... 1^st problem it was branded as Thomson’s but called TUI in The Netherlands. By the way don’t refer to The Netherlands as Holland to a Dutchman; they get quite tetchy about the fact that Holland is NOT The Netherlands! 2^nd problem was the holiday packages were in Dutch, 3^rd problem she would be the only Brit on the package holiday.

Never one to do things by halves, Sunni booked the holiday leaving within a couple of weeks. With help and advice she booked the Park Hotel in Gouvia on the Island of Corfu, on a half board basis. A few weeks later off to Schiphol Airport and off she flew.

Although they have modernised Corfu Airport there are not many scheduled flights to the place. Package Holiday Tour Companies do however fairly bombard the place between March and November. As an aside I am surprised it is not a whole year destination as it rarely gets very low temperatures and is actually still fairly cheap.

Corfu Airport is as you can see very close to the town centre. In the picture above you can see the sole runway!

Sunni eventually found the right coach to take her to the hotel, well the courier was Dutch, nuff said for now. Arrival at the hotel and Sunni found it was like the brochure pictures, in that it is a reasonably modern hotel with personable and friendly staff, good facilities and close to Gouvia town centre. Errrrmm on that point maybe better saying village not town!

Her only complaint was that the large swimming pool is not heated. One of the Dutch party ran helter skelter on the first morning shouting in Dutch something that could have been “last one in is a sissy!” and jumped in...... almost the last thing he did! It must have kick started his pacemaker because he swam the width in Olympic front crawl record speed, jumped out and took half an hour to recover!