Crete: A Trip Back in Time (or How to Holiday with Teenagers) – Travel Review

By Kevin Pilley, September 2024

The sea sparkled and spangled.

Even in September, the sun shone hotly and, rustling through the surrounding olive trees and bougainvillaea, the breeze off the Med brought the sound of gently splashing waves mingled with the excited screams from a passing inflatable towable doughnut. Closer to hand, the unmistakable shrieks of an overtired, fair-haired nine-year-old German holidaymaker whose shoulders had begun to baste and décolletage chap.

Then a loud silence fell.

Two sulky Dutch honeymooners had discovered they had booked into a busy family hotel, rather than a quiet adults-only one. Their mutually fraught silence and the new bride’s prolonged lip-pursing were doubtless due to the groom curtailing their wedding night by getting up at pre-dawn to put towels down on a couple of seafront sun loungers. The wood-fired mussels the night before hadn’t helped either. The bride looked glum. It’s hard to feel romantic when a French infant is throwing up tiramisu on the next table. And not far away, a whiny French prepubescent is complaining of stomach pains. First dates can often be traumatic.

Family holidays are so often planned with trepidation, experienced with stoicism, and remembered with a shudder.

Going on holiday with anyone – especially your family – is an art form and, on Crete, the Bluegr Hotels & Resorts chain has raised the luxury family holiday to the status of a very fine art by offering the choice of three hotels, all within five minutes of each other a mile outside Agios Nikolaos on the east coast, an hour from Heraklion airport. And not far from Elounda and Spinalonga island, the former leper colony-turned-tourist-attraction. The chain also owns the Miramare Suites and Villas on Rhodes and Life Gallery in Athens.

Visiting Crete is a trip back in time. It made us remember all our earlier holidays when the kids were growing up, making us wish we had discovered Crete and Bluegr earlier. Designed to resemble a traditional Cretan village, complete with chiming clock tower, the 220+ apartments and suites of Candia Park is the group’s young and young-ish family hotel and the place to improve your modern language skills. You quickly learn the German for “I don’t like stuffed vine leaves” and the French for “I want another cherry ice cream.” And also the required decibel level to get your wish. But the resort is spacious enough to find quiet and shade. There is even a separate beach area for empty nesters or those with slightly older children. It’s a multi-generational, undressy, value-for-money property.

Chefs at work in Agapi restaurant

“Exclusive peninsula”

Entertainment consists of bousaki evenings and watching young dads trying to blow up armbands after two ouzos. There’s also the ubiquitous British bloke wishing the staff “Calimari” (squid) rather than “Kalimera” (Good morning). The food at the Agapi Restaurant is buffet-style with plenty of it. Trips back and forth from the Rifi gelateria and getting in and out of the huge pool and walking down to the beach are the main exertions.

The superb Minos Beach Art Hotel is for the slightly older, less “TUI”, more Kids Club-averse but no less lazy families. Whereas Candia caters for those whose ideal holiday entails eating, napping, drinking, tanning, splashing, and crying, the chic Arts with its “aromatic gardens” and classy whitewashed villa bungalows (some with private pools) is for those who still prefer visiting the pool bar to visiting Minoan settlements, early Christian basilicas, archaeological sites, and folklore museums. It’s a very relaxing place. Having your own exclusive peninsula encourages immobility.

For the majority, modern pastry appeals more than ancient history.

Walt Disney was one of the first A-list celebrities to stay at Crete’s first five-star hotel. He was making 1964’s The Moon-Spinners starring Hayley Mills. Overlooking Mirabello Bay, it now has its own indoor and outdoor art collection, which means you can bump your head on some overhanging metallic sardines, walk into an “Untitled Wall”, trip over “Dirty Words”, and immediately understand the outdoor “Painful Pyramids” installation.

Waterfront accommodation at Minos Art Hotel

“Separate ways”

Every holiday is an education. Holidaying with teenagers, you learn that teenagers are people going through adolescence while parents of teenagers are people going through obsolescence. With kids between the ages of 12 and 18, a parent ages twenty years. That is fact, as much as “family activity holidays” is a contradiction in terms. The only activities teenagers are interested in are moping and moaning. They average 10 moans per hour. You can’t win. I once challenged our youngest to a game of tennis and he said he preferred to play against a wall. Sandcastles soon become passé. Teens don’t want to do anything on holiday with their parents. Where there is a will, there is always a won’t.

Everyone goes their separate ways. Mum and Dad go and look at some remains. The kids go to the pool and look at their phones. The only communal meal is toothpaste. At that age, the only local specialities our sons were interested in were girls. For them, bikinis were major landmarks. Teenagers don’t want to be around adults because they are BORING. A bore to an adult is someone who wants to talk when you want them to listen. A bore to teenagers is someone who wants to talk when they want to text.

It is wrong to say that there is little or no chance to enjoy going on holiday with your teenage children. Bluegr Hotels prove that. The truth is probably somewhere between the two. Compromise is the answer. Meet them halfway. Between their hotel and yours.

Aerial view of Minos Art Hotel

“Eating well”

At the water’s edge at the adults-only Minos Palace Hotel & Suites (top image), overlooking the Sitia mountains, the Island of Saints and Kri-Kri island (a sanctuary for endangered goats), I drew up some observations on holidaying with teenagers:

• A lolly won’t solve anything anymore. Cash usually does.
• Jeans don’t wash well abroad.
• Teenagers are things on holiday that make you miss work.
• Teens need laundry, not morality.
• The only good thing about travelling with teenagers is that at least they won’t bore you with their life story on the plane.
• “Adults-only” means the guests don’t get bolshy when offered Greek yoghurt.

On the same shoreline, between Minos Beach and Candia, the five-star Palace still prioritises sunbathing and eating well, but residents are more likely to hire a car or taxi to see Zeus’s birthplace and aren’t so actively hostile to rubble from the classic Hellenic period. The hotel attracts fewer advocates of the “half a kilometre a day and no culture” approach to holidaymaking. Although the giant pillows in the infinity pool are far more comfy than an acropolis.

Loungers at Minos Art Hotel

“Golden glow”

Guests can visit vineyards, the Vai palm forest, and the nearby mountain villages of Lato, Krystas, and Koustas where, at Xatheri restaurant, you lunch on “bourbouristi” fried snails, goat spaghetti, fennel pie meze, stuffed zucchini flowers, pork “souvlaki” skewers, boiled sheep meat, barley rusks, and traditional “gamopilafo” wedding rice with “staka” clarified butter. Over hotel breakfasts you can develop a taste for “galaktoboureko” custard pies, “Portokalopita” orange cake, “karidopita” walnut cake, “spanakopita” spinach pies, and “loukoumades” doughballs.

At the Palace’s clifftop Amar restaurant, Anthimos, Maria, Monos, Eleni, Terosi, and Aspasia fillet your sea bass and bream for you and serve local and mainland wines. While at the Beach Art’s Terpsis (“Delight”) and La Bouillabaisse seafront restaurants, Sotiris, Katerina, Maria, Petros, chef Kyriakos Mylonas and sous chef Lina do the honours with red mullet with black venere rice and vadouvan shallot and garlic sauce, red shrimp risotto, lamb, and excellent Doumo Sauvignon Blanc and Thalassitis Assyrtiko wines. The airy Mom restaurant hosts breakfasts, buffets, and also à la carte dinners.

The Amar menu said it all: “As the sun casts a golden glow on the water, time seems to stand still, reminding us of the beauty to be found in the present.”

My wife provided the footnote: “After you’ve got rid of the kids.”

Sunset on Crete

“Tranquility”

Crete guarantees that rare thing: a restful family holiday. Unless you are one of those families for whom a Fitbit watch is an inseparable family member. Then you will know no tranquillity. It will constantly alert you that you’re nowhere near achieving your daily exercise goal and continuously remind you that adjusting the notches on your recliner does not constitute “a zone”.

And, even if it does entail a significantly elevated heart rate, drooling over freshly-baked baklava millefeuille and syrup-splashed shredded filo pastry isn’t cardiovascular activity.

On Crete, your wearable tracker will only register complete sloth and bliss.

Sitting on a sea-going doughnut notwithstanding.

More info: bluegr.com

• easyJet holidays offers seven nights at the 4* Candia Park Village in Crete on a Room Only basis for £784 per person including 23kg of luggage per person, private transfers and flights from London Gatwick on 23 October 2024

• easyJet holidays offers seven nights at the 5* Minos Palace Hotel and Suites in Crete on a Bed & Breakfast basis for £1,194 per person including 23kg of luggage per person, transfers and flights from London Gatwick on 30 October 2024

• easyJet holidays offers seven nights at the 5* Minos Beach Art Hotel in Crete on a Bed & Breakfast basis for £1,531 per person including 23kg of luggage per person, private transfers and flights from London Gatwick on 30 October 2024