Today is Emma’s sixteenth birthday.
We’ve brought her presents with us, along with some candles and a birthday banner. She wanted to be woken up at 9.30 am so as not to waste too much of the day and wants to spend the day on the beach and hire a pedalo. Hiring a pedalo sounds a bit ominous to me. I’ve never been much of a pedalo man really, you hire them by the hour and after what seems like 45 minutes of pedalling and getting nowhere fast, you look at your watch and find it’s only been 5 minutes since you left the beach. Anyway we all got up early by 9.30 am and settled down so that Emma could open her presents and cards. It seemed a little strange as this was the first time that Emma had spent her birthday away from home but it was soon over and we were all on our way to the beach. Emma and Dan had both bought Li-Los earlier on in the holiday but on the way down to the beach, down a dirt track, Emma caught her Li-Lo on a thorny bush which punctured it and became the first birthday downer of the day. At sixteen your birthday should be just perfect, in fact at any age your birthday should be perfect shouldn’t it? But the younger you are the more important it is. So with no Li-Lo for the beach Emma was understandably miserable. “Don’t worry, we’ll buy another one,” Pauline told her, “Let’s get down to the beach first. I’ll buy it later.”
We reached the beach and now the search was on to hire a pedalo. But we weren’t looking for an ordinary pedalo. Oh no. Emma had seen these things which had a water slide built onto them, a bit like a double-decker boat, and she wanted one of those. Now pedalling a small plastic boat out in the ocean is not a terribly easy task, it takes a bit of effort, so just imagine trying to pedal a double-decker bus! But hang on, we aren’t there yet. First we have to find the double-decker pedalo to hire. Along the whole stretch of the beach were three pedalo men, evenly spaced out and each with their own territory. We reached pedalo man number one who didn’t have any that Emma wanted. We carried on to pedalo man number two who had one but it had just been taken. We trekked along the beach to the far end (just before the nudists started to embarrass everyone) and discovered that pedalo man number three didn’t have any double-decker ones available either.
By this time it was between 12 and 1 pm and what is the sun like at that time of day? Quite hot really isn’t it? I was struggling along at the back with Emma, Dan and Pauline striding out in front of me when someone decided that we would all turn around and go back up along the beach we’d just spent ages walking down. We were strolling along the water’s edge so despite the heat it was all quite pleasant but looking for a specific pedalo to hire was not my idea of a good time. We came back past the second pedalo man – no double-deckers. Then Pauline suddenly saw in the distance, one of these damn pedaloes being pedalled into shore. “There,” she shouted, “quick, it’s the only one, we’ll have to try and get it before someone else does.” So it was onwards at a hair-raising speed, back to the very first pedalo man that we’d passed hours ago and, yes, he had one of those huge slide on a boat things just coming in. We paid the man and I got my first glimpse of the pedalo up close.
It was like a bloody ocean liner. It seemed huge. There was room on board for a swimming pool, hairdressers, cafe and ballroom. The pedalo man held it steady while Emma, Dan and Pauline were winched on board and I was lowered down by helicopter. Once aboard, Pauline and I started to pedal so that Dan and Emma could enjoy using the slide which rose above our heads and plummeted down the front of the pedalo and into the water.
Now pedalling a pedalo, apart from not being a very good tongue twister, is a very tiring business. It always seems like a good idea at the time but after ten minutes of pedalling you’re near to collapse, you’ve got cramp in your calves and your feet are getting sore. And if you stop pedalling for just one second you’ve had it. You just drift away back to where you’ve just spent 10 minutes pedalling from. There are people swimming to the left of you, people swimming to the right of you and other pedalos looming up all around you when you’re not concentrating on where you’re going. I noticed a definite look of fear in the eyes of the swimmers as we approached them and then managed to drift so close to them that they almost had heart attacks on the spot.
Still, Emma and Dan had a good time and that’s what it was all about in the end.
For tonight’s birthday meal Emma wants to go back to one of the places we’ve been to before and to then move on to the ‘Hawaiian’ bar afterwards. We had our meal, Emma didn’t know whether to have fillet steak or pizza and in the end opted for pizza. We had a quiet word with the waitress and at the end of the meal she brought Emma’s dessert to the table with the usual sparkler stuck in the top and spluttering away. The lights were dimmed and we all sang happy birthday. Aaaaah. Then it was off to the ‘Hawaiian’ bar.
It was a large open area with a variety of different Hawaiian style wicker tables, chairs, armchairs, sofas and even those two-seater chairs that are suspended from the ceiling. It was purely a cocktail bar and the most popular choice seemed to be the various cocktails that could be ordered for a specific number of people who then all drank the same drink from a communal container the size of a punch bowl, decorated with a couple of pounds of fruit. Each individual had a three foot straw precariously sticking out of the container along with a few shorter ones about half this length.
We didn’t want to order one of these things for two reasons: One – Emma doesn’t like alcohol so would have to have something else anyway and Two – I didn’t want to look like a plonker sipping from a three foot straw like everyone else. So we all ordered individual drinks and whereas our s came up looking fairly mundane and ordinary, Emma’s non-alcoholic fruit juice punch thankfully came up with the requisite three foot straws waving about in the breeze. I say thankfully, because apart from the roller skating waiters it was the three foot straws that appealed to Emma and if she hadn’t had one it would have spoilt her birthday.
Our cocktails were about a fiver a throw and mine just tasted of sugar water to me. It occurred to me as I sat there watching all these idiots with three foot straws that perhaps I should have ordered one. I’m sure I could have moved my straw around the tables from where I was sitting and drank every other persons drink without them knowing. And if I joined half a dozen or so together, I could have a drink in every bar along the road without ever leaving my chair.
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