Modern Jive in Gran Canaria (2 - 9 Dec)

Jive Addiction (www.jiveaddiction.com) are spreading their wings and giving us dance holidays in new locations. After several successful events at La Pineda near Tarragona in Spain, I went with them to Hotel Taurito Princess in Gran Canaria. It’s located between the lovely atmospheric Puerto de Mogan and Puerto Rico (the less said about modern Puerto Rico the better). The hotel gave us everything we could need - spacious rooms, good food and drink on an all-inclusive basis, a couple of pools to lounge around and most important from our point of view, a good area in which to dance. We had a room set aside exclusive to us for the entire week. Lessons were at 11am and 5pm and freestyle dancing from 10pm onwards - generally until 3am - making it a fairly long day. Plenty of adrenalin needed for 7 days of that! Our room had a smaller room separating us from a first floor communal area with table tennis and pool tables available. Drinks were on tap - beer, a range of fizzy soft drinks and water.
This turned out to be the best of 8 dance holidays I have been on - difficult to say exactly why. The company, the ambience just fitted my, and many other people’s, mood. We all seem relaxed, enjoyed every aspect of dancing, and made new friends or were delighted to reacquaint with old ones.
Teaching was by Mark and Rachel who have become so popular with us over the last few years. They are even better in the holiday situation than in regular venues. They can teach better, longer, more advanced routines and explain more aspects of style. Rachel has a mike as well as Mark and she can give as good as she gets in the banter that goes on! The ladies certainly appreciate her going through their steps. However it seems as though Ceroc, as an organisation, is setting up contracts which will prevent Mark and Rachel from working for other groups that present Modern Jive. Wouldn’t it be good if Ceroc tried to do better things for us dancers, rather than trying to undermine the independent groups.
Adam and Tania were the other teachers (also at Scarborough) and gave us some fun routines and dips and drops.
I really enjoyed my dancing especially with J also C, C, C, K, K, F, H and many more lovely dancers. To my surprise I kept going until 2.30 ish most nights, only briefly passing through ‘grumpy old man’ syndrome stages when the music was not quite to my taste!
I never listened to my ipod, read only 3 pages of my book and only needed an afternoon nap once, so my time was fully occupied.
Yes, the best yet, except perhaps for the next one.