Happy Holidays

Lately I’ve been reminiscing about our holidaying habits. Pre-pandemic, the Husband and I would do what most families do every year, we would plan and take an annual holiday.  Most of the time we would stay in the UK with the occasional bigger trips to places like Florida and Iceland. One year we pushed the boat out and went on a Norwegian Cruise and one year we spent Christmas in Spain.  

If I’m honest, I think that I used to get more excited with the act of trawling through the internet for hours on end actually looking for the holiday and comparing prices.  I would love searching for the best deal and I think that I liked the idea of going on holiday more than the actual holiday itself.

Whilst I’m also being honest, I also think that we booked most of the holidays to provide ‘an experience’ for the child.  This was certainly the case with regards to the Florida holiday because whilst I appreciate that there are a lot of adults who absolutely love to eat, breathe and sleep Mickey Mouse at Disney World, I for one couldn’t wait to get out of the Magic Kingdom and would not darken its door again.  Well I kind of got banned anyway, but that’s another story!

And what was it all for anyway? When I ask the child (who is now not a child) what he remembers the most about Florida, what he never fails to tell us is that we didn’t go to any water parks.  

Yes that’s right, we paid £3k to virgin holidays on a trip for him to experience Harry Potter World, endured the most horrendous 4 hour queue for the Grindgotts ride for two minutes of extreme hell, we went on safari at Animal kingdom, we had lunch with a real life astronaut at Kennedy Space Center and endured the torture of what is called seaventure at discovery cove.  But because we were only there for 10 days and we were really really bad parents, we didn’t have time to allow him the experience of getting ‘wet & wild’ at the water parks and that is what he remembered the most!

So you can imagine my joy when we emerged out of lockdown and seemingly out of nowhere,  the child became 18 which meant three things, 1) he didn’t want to go on holiday with us anymore 2) he could stay at home by himself, which meant 3) he could look after the cats.

So you would think that after spending two years basically travelling to ‘costa del back garden’ pretending to be on holiday during Covid, I would have done what most people did when travel bans started to lift and toddle myself off to Tui to book jolly abroad. 

No, not me.  I was the only person I know who actually enjoyed lockdown.  I don’t say that lightly because I know that for some people it was the most terrible time to endure, but I found it incredibly liberating and it helped me re-evaluate what I really wanted my life to be like.

I was lucky, I didn’t have the fear of losing my job, I was able to work from home which instantly give me 2 hours of life back every day because I didn’t the travel time, I saved loads of money because I couldn’t go to Starbucks every lunch time, but the best thing that happened for me was that a P&O Cruise that we had booked prior to covid got postponed, not once but twice. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

By the time we could go on it, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being on a boat, full of people whilst still having to wear a mask, living in fear that I might succumb to the virus, stuck in a cabin whilst out in the choppy north sea, no thank you.

So we cancelled it and we toyed with the idea of a ‘staycation’ on the coast somewhere not too far in Wales perhaps but at the time, so was everyone else and that would mean that the hotels would just be packed full of people and I wasn’t ready to mix just yet.

So I decided that I’d quite like to go camping and my husband agreed.   We’d done our fair share of camping when we were younger and we had a tent plus all sorts of gear in the loft.

So off we went to a camp site called Barn Farm in a place call Birchover in Derbyshire.  With it being less than 1 hour journey from where we live, there were no arguments trying to find the right car park at the airports, none of that having to check that you have your passport 50 times, no nasty queues at airport check ins and no sitting there on a plane taxiing for take off thinking ‘were all going to die on this thing’ and questioning why I’ve paid to sit here crapping myself, when I don’t even want to go on holiday now anyway.

So at the campsite, Husband was under strict orders not to ‘make eye contact’ with our fellow campers which could start a conversation, I didn’t want any interaction with anyone on this trip. 

It was the summer of 2022 and the UK was experiencing higher than normal temperatures,  so the weather was on our side for once.  We didn’t cook so we ate out. We were within walking distance of two pubs. We had a front row seat to a pretty spectacular meteor shower at night and I was only bitten by mosquitos a couple of times. There was something quite satisfying about laying in bed listening to owls twit twoo ing at night, normally its the sound of rain pelting down on your canvas!

I didn’t fully manage to get away from all people on the planet, it did require some interaction and I had no choice but overhear a very loud conversation from the man with the family next door discussing amongst friends over beer the reasons why he wasn’t going to ‘reach out to Dan’ anymore.  Lucky Dan!

But apart from that, It was so relaxing that I wholeheartedly declared that it had been the best holiday that I’d had in two years and I felt very proud until hubby quickly pointed out that it had been the only holiday we’d had in two years and not to get too excited.

So if you are like me and you find peace outdoors, amongst a forest, even better if you can hear the sound of a river and there’s no people annoying you, then stop it with the stressful holidays that require another holiday to recover from the holiday.

Camping is not for everyone but for me, it still beats queing up for 3 hours in a theme park anyday!

 Happy Holidays!