“Mem, didn’t you buy strawberries and nice toppings for our breakfast? But the fridge is empty now. There are no eggs left either, and where has the fresh bread gone?” My other son already has that doubtful look on his face that says ‘here we go again’: last-minute arrivals who have added breakfast to their booking. So we are out of luck again and eat crackers with peanut butter.
A familiar scene for Ameland holiday entrepreneurs; we do our very best to make our guests happy. Sometimes that goes quite far. But of course there are limits. The man who asked whether I could personally deliver breakfast in bed, I had to disappoint. Maybe during the rugby weekend I would have hesitated for a moment (only in my thoughts, that is). Our breakfast room is close by, just come over there.
Anyway, the business is really ‘our third child’, which sometimes seems to come first and almost always seems to get its way. For instance, at our house the coats have recently been landing on the floor again instead of hanging neatly on the coat racks. Too few had been delivered for the apartments, so: unscrew ours and hang them up in the apartments. Because of the busy season it may take months before a new one is hung in our house. If ever. Fortunately the holes in the walls remind me to buy new ones.
Luckily for me, my husband and the boys don’t even notice when our own new coffee table has been swapped for a damaged one with wine stains and dried-on nail polish. They don’t use coasters themselves either, so it doesn’t keep them awake. That meagre breakfast does bother them, though.
To keep the reviews on the booking sites good, we live in a kind of second-hand-shop-furnished house. Right now there are also three lamps and four vacuum cleaners in the living room that have ‘something wrong with them’ and therefore had to be taken off ‘the front line’. Because of the coronavirus measures, the distribution of many goods had become very unreliable. Delivery times for furniture, machines, bedding: it is Russian roulette when it comes to Ameland. It gave me sleepless nights, because the new apartments were already booked for the following weekend, but the toppers to go on the beds had not been delivered. What do you do then? Disappoint the guests and cancel their weekend away? You have probably guessed it already… I didn’t sleep any better the week after, but the guests did, because my soft new toppers were dragged out of the house and put on the guests’ mattresses to guarantee their sleeping comfort.
That really went too far, my husband thought: lying awake yourself as a poor sleeper, so that the guests can have your topper! Oh well, after such a good night at least they don’t need breakfast in bed, and they have plenty of energy to walk to the breakfast room, that’s how you have to look at it.
Froukje Mosterman-de Groot
