The summer, what a glorious time to be going on your holidays, in that hot weather, the sun, the sea, the sand! Well, whilst a lot of you are on your out of Office time of the year I thought it would be fun to spend the month of August reminiscing about the world of summer travel. Now, I tend to go on a lot of my holidays in the winter but a few summer ones stand out in my mind.

Bournemouth, United Kingdom

If there is one place that I know really well in the summer, then it is Bournemouth, as I spent a lot of my summers staying down there when I was at University. I had a summer job at the seaside so I would spend the days between work and hanging out with new ‘summer friends’ (this is what I used to class them in my head).

At University, there is this weird time in the summer when a lot of your friends head home for the summer holidays, but those with jobs tend to stay. A lot of the people that tend to stay are people that at no other time of the year you would really socialise with but because there was not a lot of people around town that you knew you would use this as your advantage and all bond together and become this new weird friendship group where you go to pubs you never normally would (because when the students are not there tourists make your common locations weird and unusual) and you go on day trips to places you never would either.

I had many great summers in Bournemouth but today I want to focus on the first one that I had in the city. I was working a lot of the summer at my job in the cafe in the sea life centre right next to the beach. In the summer the cafe became really busy because of its location, a lot of the time you can just get on with it and sort of enjoy it, even though it was really busy. The one weekend that made that all change was the Airshow weekend.

It was a particularly hot Airshow weekend and that meant that the beach was absolutely packed – thousands and thousands of people had head to the beach to watch the planes. On the first day of the airshow weekend I was very lucky, we found an old ice cream bag in the storage room which let you sell ice creams up and down the beach – I volunteered to do that job and spent a lot of my day in the glorious weather walking up and down the beach selling ice creams whilst sneakily having a paddle in the sea as well. The next day I was not so lucky.

Every day there was a BBQ at the front of the cafe and we would take it in turns to be the cook for the grill. The day I got it was really hot and all i remember is the heat. It was horrible. My biggest memory from that one weekend was that the BBQ was so hot that it gave me pins and needles in my thumb for a week as it was so intense.

After that weekend I promised myself I would never work an Airshow weekend ever again and I never did. It was too intense. The next time you go into a cafe or a shop at an event as big as an airshow try and respect the people serving you as they have had a hell of a day and they can’t wait until the day is over. The person you need to feel sorry for the most is the person on the washing up station.