I could have written a post about being oh so ill for oh so long (yeah, still not better, but my brain has rebooted so I can cope now) but that would be oh so dull (though probably relatable, as almost everyone I know seems to either be ill right now, or has just been or thinks they might be coming down with something).
Instead I thought I’d share a bit about the fun of trying to map out at least some travel plans for this year. My 2024 Bingo Card (shout out to Valeria Molinari who shared this idea, in our Inky Goodness collective, and I absolutely love it – it helps to make sure to include some fairly easy things that you can tick off quite quickly, as well as big ticket items like getting your next book illustration contract) has a number of travel items on it.
1 Visiting my sister and her partner in Wales at least three times. Frankly, this should be the easiest one, but it’s month two of the year already and I haven’t managed to fit a trip in yet. Obviously the being very ill and the being very busy with work have hampered this significantly, but there are still 11.5 months left of the year, so that’s fine.
2 Portugal trip. That’s the one I was hoping would be my biggish solo trip this year, and ideally by train and fitting in Faro and Porto and Coimbra and ideally some smaller towns in between (either as day trips from the bigger places, or stops in their own right).
3 Take youngest daughter somewhere new by plane. She hasn’t been on a plane since February 2020 when we did a srprs.me trip and ended up in Rome. She likes ticking countries off, so would prefer to go somewhere she hasn’t yet been.
4 Go on a trip with husband by train. Because he loves train travel as much as me and, with the kids being older and responsible, we can actually have them fend for themselves (and for the cats) for a week (probably wouldn’t go for longer than that yet).
I didn’t have a trip with eldest daughter on the list, because she had said Paris last year would likely be her last family holiday and she’d be travelling with friends in future instead.
So these were the things I definitely wanted to fit in and I had started having some fun researching and discussing ideas. Chris suggested that we could fly in and out and then train along Italian coast, which would mean we could fit it in in a week, where it would have been harder if it were an all-train trip (though… I might also investigate night trains a bit more). Youngest daughter had wondered if we could actually go to Portugal for her trip (or Copenhagen, or Switzerland, perhaps). So I started looking at Portugal and resort trips started coming up (not normally my thing, but not something I would write off entirely) and it turned out youngest daughter would actually love a resort trip, so then I started researching more. And then Chris said he might actually appreciate a resort trip, because the idea of full-on relaxing, with maybe some beach volleyball thrown in, actually sounded appealing, so then my researching changed and it, obviously, got more expensive and then we would also have to contend with the possibility of all sharing a room, or could we get an apartment with two rooms and then we started veering away from resorts and to AirBnBs and then I thought I should double-check with eldest daughter and it turned out she would quite like to come if she could bring her boyfriend, but definitely not if it was a resort. And then Chris mentioned that maybe we could find a villa with a private pool and then it could be considered part of his lead-up-to-big-five-oh celebrations, and… it’s suddenly a whole completely different trip.
So now I am considering a big family August holiday to somewhere with a villa, private pool, three bedrooms and that is close to a train station and to a beach and to shops and restaurants. And that we can fly to pretty cheap, as there will be five of us. Currently, the top contenders are Faro, Valencia, Marseille and Malaga (closeish to these places - some might require a night at an airport hotel at each end of the trip, because very early morning or late night flights tend to be cheaper than middle of the day flights). I’m looking a lot on Vrbo, which seems to have some cheaper prices than AirBnB. I have never used them before, though, so if anyone has and can feed back their experience, would really appreciate it.
And I’m considering a separate, shorter, city break with youngest daughter not in the super expensive summer holidays, but one of the other school holidays instead. Plus the train trip with Chris. And, if we don’t end up in Portugal, I would still like to fit my solo trip there in; or a different solo trip instead, if we do. I’d love to go to Seville, and Cordoba, for example. And there’s a whole bunch of France I’d love to explore. And Italy… (Is it obvious that I’m VERY into the Mediterranean? I do genuinely want to explore other parts of Europe, too, but France, Spain, Portugal and Italy all feel like me, whereas the rest of Europe - and the world, I do realise there’s a world outside Europe - is fascinating and wonderful, but slightly outside my comfort zone, not least because of not speaking the languages, apart from German.)
Oh yes, and then someone (who was it? Ah, it was
) mentioned creating her own mini drawing residency, and that made me think that I need to do that. When I travel, I very rarely sketch what I’m seeing. I take loads of photos, and do one or two sketches, but mostly any drawing I do (that’s not paid work) is go-with-the-flow mindful type stuff (so lots of flowery sketchbook pages). I think I tend to have my head just too full of new stuff and soaking all the sights up and so on. But… I would really like to (a) start keeping a travel sketchbook of some kind (b) look at things from a different perspective and that’s not just through my phone and (c) to take a week to truly and only concentrate on creativity and drawing, with no work or cooking or shopping or general life admin to get in the way. So now I want to make one of these and fit that in, too!I am very open to suggestions of great places to look at for any of these trips.