Wish you were here?

Alex Rayner fir st visited Sardinia as a free, single 20 year-old. So how would it feel to return there twelve years later, with his wife and son? He took his first family holiday to find out

Strangest thing: I’m having a drink in Caffè Mediterraneo in the town of Santa Teresa Gallura in northern Sardinia, and I feel absolutely no compulsion to dance on the tables. Nothing. Not a single step. Which is funny, because last time I was here that’s pretty much all I wanted to do.

Then again, last time around, I also smoked a cheap packet of cigarettes about as often as I shaved (once every seven days), had a Body Mass Index only double my shoe size, and earned a monthly pay packet roughly equivalent to my current weekly supermarket shop. Back in that summer of ’96, I was an over-tanned, undergroomed, 20-year-old watersports instructor, teaching UK tourists to windsurf on an all-inclusive beach resort. Whatever energy I didn’t expend by day on the island’s northern shores, I ploughed into partying by night at the nearby bars and clubs.

Since leaving, I have graduated from university, married, started a family and got a proper job. Now I shave regularly, don’t smoke and have the kind of BMI you’re more likely to find among a Jerry Springer audience, rather than the cast of Lost. So, how does it feel to return to the island where you were once young and free, now you’re older, wider and on your very first family holiday? Well…

Getting There
1996 predates many things we now take for granted – Google, Coldplay, McFlurries. It was also before the golden age of cheap flights. Not that the airline I flew out on then offered any frills. This time around my wife, Tammy and I check the bags, clear security and push our son, Sebastian, right up to the plane in his buggy, which ground staff then stick in the hold, just before take-off.

Alghero airport. Having arranged a Hertz hire car, we roll from the arrivals hall into an airconditioned Ford C-Max – “a proper family car!” says Tammy. Despite over-packing our bags, we slide in and the child seat fits 13-month-old Sebastian perfectly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t prevent his carsickness and, after an hour or so of particularly circuitous coastal roads, he vomits just a few yards from our hotel. All progress is relative, I suppose.

Staying
Sardinia is an island of extremes. The local population is notoriously hardy – for the most part, they get by on local agriculture, viniculture and animal husbandry. Yet, ever since the billionaire Islamic aristocrat, Aga Khan IV, founded the island’s super-rich northern resort of Costa Smeralda in 1962, Sardinia has also attracted a remarkably well-heeled type of holidaymaker. These two extremes were played out in my living quarters, 12 years ago. The place where I once worked is now a luxury hotel, yet back in 1996 its staff accommodation might have featured in Oliver Twist had Fagin taken the boys on a Mediterranean pick-pocketing spree. We stayed in whitewashed outhouses, sleeping two or three to a room, showers were communal and we ate breakfast and lunch around a refectory table beside the hotel’s kitchen.

Thankfully, this time my circumstances have improved. The Hotel Corallo is a 35-room, four-star hotel, built on the tip of Isola Rossa, a low-key fishing port in the centre of the island’s northern coast. Our suite has a fine sea view, a baby’s cot and its own veranda with a Jacuzzi. The place is owned and run by a young Franco-Italian couple, Patrick and Giovanna Cesari, whose personable manner has rubbed off on all their employees. All the staff speak some English, despite our fellow guests coming from across Europe. There is a highchair ready at breakfast each morning and everyone cooes over Sebastian, despite his outbursts when we try to feed him something a bit more adventurous than Coco Pops.