I set off for Crete with a backpack and no particular plan in mind except to walk in the mountains and visit interesting places around the island, where I’d worked many moons ago. I booked accommodation for my first few days but made things up as I went along for the rest of my time there. It was an adventure.

This time’s different. I’ve got a wheelie suitcase and I’ve just arrived at a hotel in Denia, on the Costa Blanca, where I’ll be staying for a month along with a load of other older people (somehow I’m sixty-seven). A friend, Vicky, has a room here too for the same period, her friend Siobhan’s here for the first week and others may turn up. In fact, her regular winter sojourns, snow-birding as it’s often called, gave me the idea to give it a go. And, suddenly, here I am.

I’m on an ‘all–in’ holiday, with breakfast, lunch and dinner provided, evening entertainment and excursions, and I still can’t quite believe it, a free bar. We and our fellow guests have left our boilers on the lowest frost protection setting, swapping the sky-high bills and darkness of a grim English January for a milder, often sunny one here in Denia. It’s almost but not quite cheaper than staying at home.

If I’m honest, although I’ve nothing against older people, because I’ve somehow become one myself, I wasn’t drawn to spending a month with a load of old timers, or indeed any big group of any kind of people, and I may shy away from the evening entertainment.

Rather, I was lured by the all-in nature of the deal, but mostly by the prospect of winter warmth and the fact that Denia is a working, harbour town with a castle, nearby national parks and mountains, and a twenty-kilometre-long coastline, so lots to do and adventures to be had. It’s a place that Lonely Planet describe as ‘perhaps the Costa Blanca’s most appealing base’ and ‘a cheery place that lives for more than just tourism’. And a free bar.

It’s the tail end of a gruelling day’s travel, gone midnight and very warm. First impressions are half-baked because we raced through the Costa Blanca in the dark and didn’t see much of Denia as we hit town.

The staff seem very nice, the rooms too, and the free bar, yet to be fully utilised, is welcome.

The image that sticks in my mind most as I write, sleepily, is of a smartly-dressed, quite elderly gent, swaying gently by the entrance like a tree in a breeze. He was clutching a glass of wine to his chest, evidently not his first, and his red face radiated a beaming smile to anyone in range. He seemed intent on offering a sort of unofficial welcome to ‘the club’ to new arrivals, asking if they were with Saga. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to know, and perhaps he wasn’t either, but he was evidently loving it and wanted to share the joy.

(The date of this post is wrong. I drafted an ‘I’m not here yet’ message on the page a few days before arriving. It’s stuck and I can’t change it but the post refers to the actual date I got here, the 10th of January, not that it really matters)