As BA was offering double tier points on their holidays, I persuaded
Ian we “needed” another break and so booked 5 nights/6 days on Rhodes, travelling in
Club. Unfortunately our flight was once
again the earliest of the day at 06:35 so even though it was Gatwick we still
had to leave home at 03:00.
The lounge and flight were both very pleasant and the food/drink more
than acceptable on the four hour flight which seemed to pass fairly
quickly. Rhodes Airport runs parallel to
the sea and the runway looks remarkably short; to get the correct angle the plane
has to bank quite steeply and fly over Rhodes Town. You can see the 3 port areas and the old
walled town easily from the air.
Rhodes is the largest of the Dodecanese Islands, an archipelago lying in the South Eastern Aegean Sea and being only 10 nautical miles from Turkey the island was an important stepping stone on the trade routes.
We’d booked a hire car for 3 days which we were due to pick up in a couple of days
and so to get to our hotel, about 14kms north of the airport, we decided to get
the local bus. We stopped at the tourist
information point in the airport and a very helpful lady gave us directions for
the No.50 bus stop and also maps and ideas for when we have the car. As we approached the bus stop there was a bus
waiting which showed Rhodes Town but a No.57 so I convinced Ian it couldn’t
possibly be ours and we let it go.
Unfortunately, it must have been it as the live timetable then changed
to show we had a 30 min wait for the next one
- never mind we can’t check in until 15:00 anyway. So we sat in the sunshine and waited for the
next one and in due course paid our €3.50 each and enjoyed a pleasant 30 min
ride to the hotel. The hotel was set
back from the road and when it was originally built I should imagine the
driveway, which now just leads up to the car park area, had continued round in front of the hotel
reception area. However an outside seating decked area has since been created and
whilst this is very nice, it does mean that on arrival it isn’t obvious how to
get to reception, so we wandered through the grounds and the pool bar which
didn’t give the best impression of the place.
At this point I’m going to rewind and try to justify (to myself, mainly)
why I booked this hotel; the only All Inclusive beach hotels we’ve stayed in before
were Sandals (St Lucia twice, Jamaica and Antigua) and whilst the cost of this hotel
wasn’t quite on that scale, I thought it would be a similar experience – it wasn’t!!!
But it was a perfectly acceptable place; spotlessly clean if a little
tired, plentiful quantities and variety of food and wine on tap (literally!)
So this mini blog is really just somewhere for me to put my photos and
make a few comments about the places we visited.
Once unpacked we headed out for a walk with the intention of exploring
Rhodes Old Town which was supposedly a 20 min walk. Unfortunately it was a good way further than
that and after about 30 mins the Old Town still hadn’t come into view and we
assumed it must be around the headland but quite how much further we didn’t
know. Ian’s poor knee couldn’t take much
more (he’s been having trouble for a couple of months now and is wearing quite
heavy strapping when he walks any distance or plays golf) so we decided to
return to the hotel and go in by bus the next day.
