I had a very hard sell to E!
Chapter IV: Booking the holiday
I had had a particularly bad autumn 2011; I turned thirty in November and went exceedingly introvert over the period of a few weeks before this. E thought I was depressed and maybe she was right, but I just couldn't see happiness in anything I did, and even had a few very dark thoughts. I felt I had missed out on so much when I was younger and failed to see what I had achieved in life. I couldn't see my behavioural change at the time, but got irritated when several of my colleagues kept asking if “everything was OK.” It wasn't, but I didn't know what to say: if I didn't know what was wrong, then how could I explain it? I just couldn't see a happy ending to what I was doing with my life, and I had no idea why.
These were feelings I had not really experienced for any length of time before but my wife was good with me and was supportive; she was aware of everything I wanted to do with my life and she knew what I had not managed to do. But in reality, I think I was ready for a proper break and we had not had one for years. I needed a change.
This would be surprising to many people, but I generally don't like holidays. There is plenty of upheaval and messing around for a few days of being somewhere else. Often the “tourist” spots are overpriced and the locals are rude, which combined with bored and/or tired children, does not make a recipe for relaxation.
That is not to say that I don't enjoy parts of a holiday but I never get to properly relax and something is always ready to stress me; I am highly strung! This is bad enough when in the UK but being in a foreign country where nobody speaks your language and not understanding what is going on, can only increase the stress. I am not a good traveller.
A full time childcare place in a UK nursery is easily in excess of £700 per month and with my daughter, and before her my son in childcare, the ability for us to travel abroad was rarely present financially, and the last time I travelled to another country was in 2007 when my wife and I went on our honeymoon.
This was to Iceland and we had a good time all week until we had to fly home. On arriving in Keflavik, we disembarked from the plane, cleared passport control, retrieved our bags and visited the shop inside thirty minutes. On arrival in Manchester a week later, we took two and a half hours to clear passport control, was shouted at by a Border Agency official (for daring to cross a white line) and it was nearly four hours to get back to our car. My letter to Manchester Airport asking them to go to Iceland to see “how an airport should be run” went unresponded to, but I didn't fancy travelling again. It was hassle I did not want, and for four years I maintained that opinion.
The opportunity for a family holiday presented itself in the form of an unexpected pay rise in October 2011. My company was purchased/rescued/acquired (depending on the newspaper article) by a much bigger company in 2008 and after making around two-thirds of the staff redundant merged the terms and conditions of us left into those of their staff.
This meant that I jumped pay bands (which are set at Southern wages) and got an instant £150 per month pay increase after tax – not to be sneezed at! I made a conscious effort to put that money (plus anything more I could afford) to one side and in January 2012 began to consider holidays. I knew I would have the best part £2,000 to play with and that would buy us a decent family holiday abroad, for the first time.
Out of that would have to come passports for two adults and two children and I began to see what I could get with my money. I stumbled across Peng Travel that offered naturist holidays and found a handful of suitable destinations on the Croatian coast.
I casually mentioned that I wanted a family holiday abroad when my wife and I were playing a board game and then detailed how I intended to pay for it. She listened and nodded appreciatively and then I suggested what I had been thinking of; a trip around Europe where we would stay in such a clothing-optional camp for a few days at the beginning or end of the holiday without spending all of our time there.
I was conscious about my wife's feelings and it was not something we had actively discussed as a possibility; I guessed that she would dismiss it, but she didn't and I showed her some of the places I had been considering along with the principles of the naturist lifestyle.
To begin with, she was a little wary of the idea but as it was clothing-optional, it would give me the freedom to practice what I wanted and E would have the ability to remain covered. She agreed to spend a few days at the beginning of a ten-day holiday and I showed her the Croatian resorts I was considering. We had had a joint party in December to celebrate our combined thirtieth birthdays. This was something that I really didn't want, and she got her own way on the catering, fancy dress, theme and venue. She reasoned I was owed a bit of getting my own way and she told me we could stay all week in the clothing-optional resort – as long as she could stay clothed if she didn't feel comfortable!
I asked for a price for a week it came in at over £2,500. This was more than I wanted to pay although the gentleman at the naturist travel company suggested we consider Euronat or La Jenny in France as they were more suited to families.
They were naturist resorts and as we looked through the website at them I put the idea to one side, only to have E say that these were fine if we were not going to stay the week. In essence, I could have a few days of my holiday if afterwards we travelled to Paris to spend a couple of days in the French capital taking our children to Disneyland Paris.
I couldn't protest too much, despite my general objection to theme parks (too expensive, too much queuing and too frustrating) but as the travel company offered only seven day stays at La Jenny, I booked direct with the holiday park for four nights.
We didn't tell our kids about the trip to the theme park, informing them that we had a surprise for them when on holiday, but that we would be staying somewhere where they could be naked all day. My son, who is seven, gave a furrowed brow and then laughed. He kept asking questions about the trip over the coming months including my favourite, “do you put suncream on your willy?” I couldn't answer for definite, but I guessed so; would you want sunburnt genitalia?
My wife later told me that she thought it was the most selfless thing she had ever done, and I definitely agreed with her. She openly admitted – after I booked the four nights at La Jenny, flights to Bordeaux from Luton, car hire, hotel in Paris and flights from Paris back to the UK – that the thought of going naked in public terrified her, as well as the act of flying.
I felt guilty but she was too late; the holiday was booked. We were going to La Jenny.
Chapter V: Preparing for the holiday
Great ideas and plans made in January don't always appear quite so good come August! Take for example, the idea that we would only need to take small suitcases – we were spending two thirds of our holiday with little on – so a small car would be ideal. As I printed off every voucher we would need twice and put the copies in two folders (in case one got lost) I realised that the three bags I had booked in with airline in January would not necessarily fit into our “VW Polo or Similar” car I had hired from Auto-Europe in April.
(As an aside, I also bought tickets for Disneyland Paris in advance and printed them off as e-Tickets but bought them through the French site for 46 Euros each – around £37. When I looked to buy them on the UK version of Disneyland Paris they were £70 each for the day I wanted to go!)
Our eight towels filled one suitcase and the clothes that I knew we would need for the four of us filled the other two. This would be fun and games for the Monday we would arrive if they gave us a very small car as the kids would need to have the cases balanced on their laps.
E and I took different approaches to whom and what we told about our holiday. I was quite open with a couple of people at my place of employment – an IT department at a financial institution – and before long the news of exactly where I was going had spread. I had never seen myself as particularly prudish or conservative but a few other people had and the thought that I would strutting around a
French beach with nothing on caused a degree of amusement.
My Helpdesk Manager was particularly enchanted, if that is the word, and made reference to my holiday on a number of occasions. It was all playful banter but I was told more than once that they both wanted and didn't want to see the holiday photographs; could they please make up their minds?!
I had a couple of my friends claim that they couldn't do “it” because they felt they were insufficiently endowed, which I found a somewhat strange notion; perhaps there was the belief that to be a naturist there was a minimum size of genitalia? If this was the case should being a naturist be seen as a badge of honour? It was a crazy idea but one that I am sure my friends were not alone in thinking.
The weekend before we arrived and after several panics of thinking I had left something behind, we were driving down to London (I would obtain my first speeding ticket since I passed my test ten years previous in Staffordshire on this route but that's another story; I was clearly keen to go on holiday!)
We stayed at my parent's house for a couple of days prior to going on the trip. To prepare, I had obtained a copy of Channel 4's documentary Diary of a Teenage Nudist and my mother had helpfully given me an article that had come from her weekend newspaper supplement of Liz Jones attending a nudist garden party.
The documentary, from 2004, was surprisingly balanced and well produced although I didn't quite agree with everyone featured in it. It was made when the documentary maker was eighteen and had grown up in Fiveacres – a naturist club a stone's throw from where I grew up. She became very reticent about the lifestyle in her teenage years and met a number of naturists who were generally positive about naturism but she was surprisingly body-conscious. I was particularly annoyed by the last guy she interviewed, who claimed that there was always a sexual element to naturism; needless to say I thought he was wrong.
This film worried me slightly. Here was a girl – Bianca Badham – who had grown up in a family-run and family-orientated naturist resort and had decided to partially turn her back on the lifestyle. Although she did not dismiss it, she did not have the same enthusiasm and excitement I had, and I began to wonder if I had seen the world through rose-tinted goggles. If I liked it and we went back, what would the kids make of it? How would it affect them as we grew up? In short, it gave me something to think about.
I felt the supplement article, however, was nothing short of pure self-indulgent naivety. The author, whose article spanned four pages, had denigrated and patronised the lifestyle but kept her clothes on for almost all of the day. Quite why she found it acceptable to poke at people who were enjoying themselves doing what they wanted to do when she was unwilling to try it, was beyond me. The author, Liz Jones, explained why she felt uncomfortable taking off all of her clothes, but if that was the case I would assert that it made her an unsuitable person to write the investigative article if she was so unprepared to participate. It was like a travel correspondent flying somewhere, staying in the airport, speaking to some travellers returning home and then flying back to the UK, only to write that the destination was not worth visiting; it was my belief that it was lazy journalism and it irritated me!
One thing she did mention, and that we already knew, was that everyone always sits on towels, and I had therefore splashed out £40 on new towels – we had a brightly coloured beach towel each and I had also been a got four of the Tesco Value “bath sheets” that were not much thicker than ham, but ideal for chucking over items of furniture to sit on; we would throw them in the bin while in France as they cost no more than £12 for the four of them, as they had no use to us other than to be little more than seat protectors.
As we settled down the night before our flight, my wife was more apprehensive than ever, but as we turned the lights off at 10pm, I knew that within twelve hours I would be in France and speeding towards my dream; even I felt butterflies in my stomach.
Chapter VI: Monday
Alarms are not really a pleasant sound, particularly not at 3am in the morning but my peace-shattering buzzer was not unwelcoming. I had not slept too well and had no more than four hours sleep but we wanted to be at “London” Luton at 4:15am.
My dad had very kindly been volunteered, by my mother, to take us to the airport at the ungodly hour and we loaded the bags into the car to do the twenty or so miles to Britain's most unloved airport.
I had checked-in online and proceeded to drop the bags off – only to be asked if they had rechargeable batteries in them after she had sent the bags down the conveyor belt. She then had to order them back, who sent them to the outsized baggage area, which took around an hour – only for me to check them back in again with the batteries in my hand luggage. It was unnecessary and frustrating, particular as the London Luton security staff had no idea rechargeable batteries were not allowed in the hold on Easyjet flights; this was not a good start and only served to reinforce my pre-held notion that holidays are nothing but trouble and aggravation.
As my weight fluctuates, my trousers are often a bit, or a lot, bigger than my waist (much to my wife's annoyance), hence the need for a belt and as we completed the security checks, the alarms sounded and I was taken to one side and told to remove the leather strap preserving my dignity. “Yeah, I sort of need that to keep my trousers up,” I moaned but they were unmoved. I had to remove it and the trainers as they frisked me with my rapidly tumbling trousers. I was danger of getting half way to naturism before we had even left the country.
I did wonder whether we could solve all our security problems by everyone flying naked and there would be no need for any body scanners; my near bottomless state caused embarrassment because I was the only one who wasn't completely attired and I wondered how I would feel if all my fellow travellers were dressed in the same way.
Exploding batteries and descending trousers aside, the flight was fairly OK. The airport is functional and no-frills but then I expected this and paid no premium for the flights. It was cheap, if not particularly cheerful. Easyjet staff were polite although between our bag being checked-in in Luton (for the second time) and arriving in Bordeaux, a wheel had been snapped off the case that once held the rechargeable batteries. Punishment maybe from the bag handling staff, for causing them all that trouble.
The little ones enjoyed flying, much more so than my wife who is terrified of doing so. She panicked through most of it, although as the children looked at the trees and plants that surrounded the airport runway they told me that France looked very much like England when we landed. It was foggy when we left Luton and clear blue skies when we landed in Bordeaux; meteorologists they will not be!
It took about an hour to get to La Jenny in our rented Renault Clio (that did fit three suitcases in the boot) and which I drove far slower than I would normally drive given that they drive on the wrong side of the road. We only got lost once when the directions from Google Maps were not as great as I had hoped but this wasn't a big problem as I had loaded all the maps I would need onto my Android smartphone.
Indeed, the original directions that I had printed from Google Maps from Bordeaux-Menignac Airport to La Jenny had us going up a farm track as the mapping provider for Google has labelled unpassable roads as driveable. Fortunately I realised before we left England when I saw the “Streetview” photographs of our journey and made new maps going via a small village called Le Porge, which made the journey still around 45km (28 miles) from the big city. The road from the local hamlet to La Jenny – their drive entitled Route de La Jenny – is a few kilometres long and it seemed to go on forever through wooded areas and up and down small hills but eventually we arrived at our destination.
The first thing we saw as we approached our holiday venue was a naked pair of buttocks on the golf course, which was alongside their driveway and it caused the kids to giggle. “I guess we are in the right place,” I said to E but she was a little quiet. The staff at La Jenny spoke perfect English, and I gave them my voucher and they took my credit card details for the deposit, before
giving me our sheets that we were renting for the week. If we had driven we would have brought our own but as we flew and had no space in any of our luggage, so we paid the thirteen Euros to hire them.
We were lucky in that we had immediate access to our villa as La Jenny do not normally grant access until 5pm. Presumably, as we were not a Saturday arrival there was no-one staying in our villa the night before and we were given the keys and directions; it was a little unexpected from what I was told to expect and certainly welcome.
The village is full of pine trees and the roads through them are not narrow but speed is limited to a few kilometres per hour. We had a space to park in front of our home from home, that itself wasn't that far away from the reception and village centre. My wife's first impressions were “this is nice” as we walked onto the decking and she saw a garden table and chairs that looked out over the trees. The patio doors led into a kitchen-cum-diner-cum-lounge and located off the “corridor” was a small toilet, a small bathroom and two small bedrooms – one containing a double bed and another containing bunk beds for the children.
I would describe our Fauvette villa as compact but that is often used by estate agents negatively and I don't mean that. It was homely, and tidy; space was at a premium and was used well. We liked it, and it was a perfect size for a family of four for the few days we would be there.
We unloaded the car and pulled open the suitcase of towels, packing a bag to take down the pool and then I implored my family to join me. I was naked within five minutes of entering the villa and while E was still searching for items and trying to unpack, I was a naturist for the first time in my life. I could feel the adrenaline pumping in my chest and I had butterflies. I was actually, really going to be a naturist.
Going Bare! Page 2
