Have you had a holiday this year? In the UK we haven’t had much of a summer, so if you wanted warmth you would’ve had to leave the country for a while. Travel is a big deal for our family. Not long after we first met, myself and my (now) wife took ourselves and our children on a gap year around the world, long before that sort of idea became a ‘thing’. Facebook and Instagram were a good few years away. Shame.
This year we’ve managed a week in Malta, and a cruise in the Norwegian fjords. Before we met, I was into hiking in remote parts of the world: Kilimanjaro, Everest base camp, the Atlas mountains in Morocco. You know, sleeping in sheds and tents with no toilets, freezing your way through the night. So my wife was surprised when she first took me on a cruise and I liked it.
While hiking through the foothills of the Himalayas is life-changing, and our gap-year is one of my proudest achievements, one of the best ‘holidays’ I’ve had was in 2022, when we went for a week’s cruise in the Caribbean from Florida, where we did paddleboarding and jetskiing for the first time, followed by a week in the theme parks at Disney and Universal, including a visit to Kennedy Space Centre. Just the two of us, no kids! Simple escapism. A bit like reading a book