The Weekly Round Up #15 - The Holiday Edition

So if you follow me on my twitter or instagram, or read any of last weeks blog posts, you'll know that I darted off on an impromptu holiday, before starting my new job, with my family. It was a real last minute thing as we realised that that week was pretty much the last chance we were going to get to go on one last family holiday (I'm old now, sob), so we booked up five days before we left, and headed out to Mallorca.

In an effort to make this blog a little more personal, I thought I'd share my holiday instagram snaps, and add in a little bit more information about what we did/where we stayed, stuff like that!  Hope you enjoy this!

 

 We stayed at the Protur Biomar Gran Hotel and Spa, which is a five star hotel located on the east of the island. I don't think anything I say will really do this hotel justice, but I will say they deserved every single one of their five stars. We were given a complimentary upgrade to two suites, I don't actually have any photos from the room because I took them on my camera and the memory card has bugged out :( but it was a beautiful room with a long corridor, a little tv room with a sofa and arm chair, a big twin room and then a gorgeous new bathroom complete with massive tub! (needless to say, I got in there pretty sharpish!). We arrived really late, and had missed dinner but the hotel kindly sent up an assortment of meats, cheeses, salad, bread and fruit for us to eat (good job too since the champagne at check in was going to my head having not eaten!). The hotel was pretty quiet, we never struggled to get a sunbed, breakfast and dinner were never busy and there weren't many kids there (there was a separate sunbathing area for over 16s anyway). There were two big outside pools but we spent most of the time at the one pictured above, since that's where the bar was!

With our room we also got complimentary access to the spa, where there was a giant pool with different jacuzzi seats and big jets of water, and also steam rooms and saunas of varying temperatures.

The staff also were all incredible, very eager to help and all very polite and chatty.

We were half board and ate at the hotel for a couple of lunches too (the sandwich and burger both came from the terrace bar).  Despite the hotel being pretty pricey, the food and drinks were actually quite reasonable. Lunch was around the ten euro mark, cocktails were 7€ and the sangria was 5€ (pretty impressive when you consider the size of that thing!). All the food I ate there was incredible, and there was a huge selection, but it was the desserts that really impressed! They had the biggest selection of hot and cold desserts, along with selected ice creams and fruit, as well as a chocolate fountain. I'm probably about a stone heavier now!

 The downside to this hotel is that the surrounding area isn't great. It's got a lot of tacky tourist shops, and cheapy english bars, but that wasn't really what we were after. Luckily we had a hire car so we went out a couple of days exploring, with some recommendations of places to visit from family friends! We headed out to Mondrego on the south coast (middle two pictures) which is a very small cove in a nature reserve with beautiful views, crystal clear water, and white sand. It's tucked away at the bottom of a nature reserve and was pretty quiet. The water was gorgeous (once you got used to swimming around next to the fish!). We also visited Porto Christo (bottom picture) where we had lunch. My parents and sister also visited the Drachs Caves at Porto Christo, I sat that out however since I'm incredibly claustrophobic! On our last day we drove up to the northern part of the island and planned on visiting Formentor beach, which had been widely recommended, however, parking was really expensive, you had to pay for a whole day, and we only wanted to go down for a little look, so we followed the road round to Formentor Lighthouse. Whilst the drive is pretty hair raising (think narrow roads, winding round cliff edges, jagged rocks and no barriers) the views were incredible, along the drive and from the lighthouse, so it's well worth a visit!

I shall be getting back into the swing of blogging asap, but I'd like to thank my wonderful guest posters for helping me out while I was away! If you haven't already, go check out Ambi, Elysia and Linda's blogs!

Hope you've had a good week!