La Residencia seen from the hills above
We weren’t supposed to be spending a week in Mallorca. We were supposed to be spending two weeks in Burma and a week in Malaysia. But we deferred our planned trip until the autumn, due to Janie’s twin, Phillie’s indisposition. The compromise was to take this short break in early spring, between Phillie’s initial surgery and the start of her myriad of follow-up ops and treatments.
Janie had read only good things about La Residencia, which at that time was owned by Richard Branson and managed by one of his tip-top teams. It is now part of an up-market chain and might well have a different vibe.
We loved the place.
The bedroom came with a guard bear named Julio, who you can just about see guarding from above in the next picture:
The bathroom had a rubber duck.
We respectfully left the bear and duck in situ at La Residencia, but subsequently have always had at least one duck in our main home. As for a bear, we had for some years had a bear, named Geddy The Teddy, but he went to stay with Phillie to keep her company when she was in hospital later that year and stayed with Phillie henceforward. Then Kim arranged for Hippity to join us and the rest is history:
…but I digress.
I didn’t keep a log on this holiday but we did shoot a roll of film each, 32 of which are labelled and set out in the Flickr album below:
While about half of those grace this article.
We played tennis pretty much every day (I think we were rained off one day), including, unusually for us, a couple of sessions with the wonderful coach there, George. Yes, really he was called George. We learned quite a lot from him in a short period of time. Gentle instruction and lots of encouragement.
We had hired a car for this trip, although we didn’t use it all that much, only going out for the day a couple of times plus one or two short trips in the vicinity of our village, Deià.
We chose to go out on the less-good weather days. Sensible in a way, but we nearly lost our lives on a long-and-winding hillside road between Deià and Palma, when, despite my low speed, I completely lost control of the car for a while on the slippery road surface. After our return, I raised this matter with a Mallorcan employee/colleague, Teresa Bestard, who was working with Z/Yen at that time.
Oh, yes, I know that treacherous patch of road. We locals call it “Dead Man’s Curve”.
We also visited Cala Major, where we visited Joan Miró‘s place:
We also did a little bit of tourism around our locality, Deià. Not much to see, but Robert Graves settled and lived there for most of his life.
But mostly we hung out at La Residencia, playing tennis, eating a good breakfast, nibbling light at lunchtime (perhaps beer and nuts), enjoying the pool and eating in one of the fine restaurants at La Residencia – a place that people would visit from far and wide for one of the restaurants.
It was just a week-long break, taken in strained circumstances, but we both have very happy memories of this short holiday.