Since the global recession began in 2008, I’ve upgraded to strictly luxury holidays. Most people have cut back. I’ve put on the Ritz, at least twice a year, for the last few years.
A peak out from the back of my rented villa.
I’m sorry if your retirement account lost money over the past few years. We were most likely on the other side of that trade.
My day job is rather dull, however, despite all the excitement that can go with the financial markets. I spend all day honing algorithms, chasing down bugs in the spaghetti code of Russian IT contractors, and surfing the web on our ridiculously zippy corporate internet connection. I may be just a code jockey, but I get plenty of vacation time.
You may not be aware about the luxury destinations of the islands that dot the Balearic sea. You may not even know that the Balearic exists. Most tourists are happy for it to stay that way, but I’m feeling generous. It’s entirely possible to get a round trip flight and an entire villa to yourself almost anywhere on the Balearic archipelego to the east of Spain for anywhere between £400-700.
As long as you’re not living entirely off of cheques from the Child Support Agency for cranking out yet another mewling youngster, you can afford to live like a master of the universe on a small private estate on these ever-sunny islands.
Palma is the largest, most tourist-centric island, and there’s plenty of territory to cover there. It’s about the size of three Isles of Man all laid out next to one another, albeit far warmer, less rocky, less rainy, and full of more attractive women. Villas are nice for when you simply want most of your time to yourself – or to share with your partner. For trips where you’d like to be pampered, it’s possible to find accommodations in the three to five star range for about the same price.
What I love doing is just spending as much time as I possibly can staying as far away as possible from computers. Which isn’t terribly hard on the islands, as long as you avoid “business centers” at the hotels, where miserable techno-junkies waste their vacations responding to pointless e-mails.
At work, I spend all day staring into text editors, compilers, and financial charts. When I head out to the Balearic islands, I bring a satchel full of novels and recent nonfiction to burrow my way through. Once my vacation is over, I return back to London, several color grades darker and having read more books in a week than the average Briton completes in a decade.
My advice to you is to do what I do: Fly into disconnected luxury. Then, return to your job, feeling that much more smug and well-read than your fellows. It makes the rest of the year tolerable.
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