Why does it always rain on me?
Our blogger Miss W has always been known to love the rain in Ibiza, but this week finds herself writing about a desperate need of sunshine.
I know, I know. I am the blogger who literally prays for it to rain so I can write about it. I am the person in Ibiza who shrills with glee the second the first hard rain hits Ibiza in summer and who thrives on it when it sets in during the winter months. I am the one who gloats about loving the rain more than any other type of weather in the world. But today, my dear readers, the shoe is finally on the other foot. I’m on holiday (staycation style), I have friends (with toddlers in tow) visiting Ibiza and it’s forecast to rain every damn day this week. And so, with my leopard print umbrella at the ready, I find myself scouring the internet looking for things to do when it rains in Ibiza. And dammit, if it’s not a stream of my own bragging blogs that come up in the Google search results! I feel an overwhelming urge to take to social media and apologise to anyone who’s ever gone to read one of my blogs for rainy day inspiration and came up (pardon the pun) dry. Please, accept my humble apologies if you are one of those people.
So now I have to use my brain. I have to get creative. While Mummy, Daddy and Miss W could happily take to a beach restaurant and enjoy the wild weather views over a bottle of vino tinto and some tasty Mediterranean cuisine, the little ones are going to need a little more in the way of entertainment than a sippy cup and some patatas bravas (sin bravas, obvs). Plus, there’s the matter of strapping a two-year old into a pram and manoeuvring our way up through the wet, slippery, windy Dalt Vila streets while trying desperately to cling to her six-year old brother’s hand and pretend we’re having fun… and that’s before we reach the 95 stairs it takes to walk up to my car. Here’s another time my gloating has come to bite me. I love, love, love living in Dalt Vila. I love having a lifestyle that generally means if it rains I can stay home for days – it’s totally acceptable to cancel meetings if it’s rainy in Ibiza and these days we’ve finally got enough places that home deliver to keep things interesting on the eating front. But telling a kid you live in a castle just doesn’t cut the mustard when they’re sitting INSIDE a humid old apartment with nothing to play with and they can’t see the tower, the cannons, the drawbridge and the enormous wooden gates. As far as these kids are concerned, coming to stay with Miss W in Ibiza is an epic fail).
So next, I turn to my friends who are mums – and there are quite a few, for which I’m grateful – and yet, I find there are still not a whole lot of options. Almost everything for little kids seems to be geared towards the great outdoors. The rare few museums aren’t going to be interesting. All the restaurants with kids’ clubs are closed. The cinema is in Spanish. The caves, while underground, are pretty grim. Shopping is pretty much all aimed at adults. Bowling doesn’t open until late which doesn’t agree with the little tummies’ dinner times. They’re too young for escape rooms. And so… we go back to those most old fashioned of rainy day activities. We build forts under tables. We secretly thank Walt Disney for making such an impression of me at an early age, which means I am now the proud owner of a large collection of movies, old and new. We turn plastic water bottles into robots; we make fake cupcakes out of balls carefully placed into candles (clever huh?); we pray my cats have the patience to be chased around in circles for the rest of the week. And we wait, watching the ever-changing weather forecast and hope the sun’ll come out tomorrow…
Come for a holiday in October, she said (she being me). It will be fun, she said, As a matter of fact, she actually said it would be glorious weather, the beaches would be deserted and there’d be loads of great things to see and do. I guess the moral of this story is, you should be careful what you wish for. Because, just like me, you might get it when you actually don’t want it!
