Large Family Looking For Accommodation – The Real Treasure Hunt

We, as a large family, often have to play the hand we are dealt with. This is especially true when we decide on the destination of our holidays.

Given is the fact that it’s the seven of us in our family, so we need at least three rooms at the accommodation in order for all of us to feel relaxed during the holiday. So this is the hand we’re dealt with and this is what reduces our holiday options to the minimum.

If we’re skilful enough – and why wouldn’t we be, as creativity is an everyday part of our life -, we can further narrow our already limited options by going to a place which provides full board… and preferably good one.

We could list a lot of aspects which make a place family-friendly, but frankly, based on our experiences over the years, the number and arrangement of the rooms and the possibility of full board are the most important aspects, everything else comes after them.

We have been to a place where we slept in the living room on a convertible sofa, which could have passed as a 3D terrain map, because there were so many hills and valleys on it thanks to the previous guests (but at least we felt the accommodation was popular, there are a lot of guests, the occupancy rate is big).

Not only was the sofa uncomfortable to sleep on, it also transformed into a transit route every night, since the only bathroom with the only toilet opened from the living room and our kids found that the shortest route to the toilet went through our sofa…, but I was happy, because it would have been a lot worse if half-asleep I had had to clean up the consequences of incidents which might have happened as a result of a four-step-longer route.

An issue just as burning as the size of accommodation is food… and it’s not necessarily the quality of food, which of course is important as well (luckily my kids are not picky and yet there has been no sign of food allergy in the family), but whether there’s a possibility to have breakfast, lunch and dinner.

For some mysterious reasons many of the accommodation providers think a domestic worker comes with us on our holiday, who makes our meals, does the washing-up, sets the table before the meals and clears the table after the meals; or that I can clone myself and while one of me does all the chores as if we were at home, the other me has a fun and relaxing time as it should be on a holiday.

Well, I have to disappoint you, because although I’m capable of a lot of things as a large-family mother, things I previously thought impossible, I’m not capable of the above.

The other problems seem insignificant compared to the above-mentioned two, such as the retro-style furniture of the accommodation, the lack of a step stool for children in the bathroom or socket safety covers in the rooms, because it’s easy to find solutions to these and these problems don’t really affect the atmosphere of the holiday…, as opposed to the case when I have to cook and do the washing-up in (kind of) retro-style conditions.