Living the life of Riley…

In the last of my retrospective blogs (I mean I need to bring this blog up to date at some point!), it’s about how our research for travel went from selecting just 2 adults to now having to scroll over to the ‘select how many children’ box too.  Just the one, please.

I joked early on to my husband that if we were fortunate to have children, my one ‘request’ (please note: I use this term VERY loosely) was that they weren’t born over Christmas.  This all stemmed from one of my close friends having her birthday on Christmas Eve and her big day always being overshadowed by Maria Carey singalongs…Anyway without getting into the nitty gritty, we actually took a pause from ‘things’ (TMI?) so that we could avoid this.

Our son decided he was super comfy and arrived very late on 17th December.  Just the one week before Christmas, so it’s a double whammy of a month for him and a mental month for us! Fabulous!

Anyway – travel with a child.  The list of places he’s been is a JOKE.  Before I list them, remember he’s only nearly 6 and I first went on a plane when I was NINETEEN (Yes, I’m clearly just jealous);

·       Scotland (Where else would we start?!)

·       Italy x 2

·       Greece x 3

·       Portugal x 2

·       Wales

·       France x 3

·       Spain

·       Isle of Skye

·       Denmark

·       Jersey

·       Bali

·       UK (Isle of Wight, Cornwall, Lake District, Northumberland, Kent, Devon, Sussex, Dorset) – 2020 vibes innit

Our first trip with him was driving up to Scotland to see my husband’s family, no doubt he was wondering what all this ‘holiday’ fuss was about; he was stuck in the car for 8-hours and arrived in Cumbernauld! 😉 BUT it was a holiday for us as we got 2 more pairs of hands to help!!! Which at 3 months old is a god-send. Plus you have to manage expectations, y’know.  If his first trip was to the Maldives, where do you go from there… 😉

At the time my brother was living in Italy so at 5 months old, we got him his first passport.  The joys of having to get a passport photo for a baby when all they do at that age is sleep (during the day!!) and you have to get a photo with their eyes open! Thank goodness you can upload your own photos to do this now otherwise it would have been countless trips to the photo booth.  On that note, the fact that their 1st passport lasts 5 whole years is ridiculous.  Passport control at the airport checking a 5 year old versus a photo of a baby? Yep, he kiiiiiind of looks the same…crazy!

Anyway, we booked him on his first Ryanair flight (no expense spared!) to Perugia to stay in the most beautiful Villa in a small town called Todi in Umbria.  He got to meet his cousins and we got to eat pizza whilst looking out on a vineyard overlooking the Umbrian rolling hills.  LUSH.

We upped our game from hereon-in and we went on our first ever package holiday to Sagres in Portugal when I soon realised the joys of having a Tour Operator looking after all your needs.  Flights, car hire, accommodation, baby essentials, baby toys, everything.  A home from home.  Yeah, I won’t lie those first few holidays just felt like a change of location; I’m a beach girl but with an 18 month old you need the shade so boy did we make the most of those naps.  If you’re like me here’s a top tip – pay the extra money and get a terrace/garden so that you can sit out in the sun whilst they nap…

We also had to battle with the fact that our son suffered from a little bit of travel sickness (was he really ours?!) so there have been many times when he’s not been quite right on the first day of some of our holidays.  The one that pops to mind first is when we fed him a whole load of strawberries which made a timely reappearance when we just started our 2-hour journey in a hire car…the windows remained open for the majority of that trip!

As he’s got older he’s definitely got our giddiness for holidays, of course that’s helped by us, but he has the same excitement as I did when I was a kid – the countdown, the waking up in the dark to set off early, the fun of the travel, rules from home going out the window (11am beer anyone?!)…

Up until last year the longest flight he’d been on was 5 hours to Greece, so at 4.5 years old we decided to embark on our first long-haul flight to Bali.  To see him realise the TV screen on the back of the plane seat was all for him (to choose whatever he wanted to watch) made his day.  We took a day flight which at the time made sense as he’d never slept on a plane before but this meant that when we got to Bali he was KNACKERED.  Of course he fell asleep just as we were about to land into Singapore but he woke up so giddy and excited that he ran around the airport like a maniac. 

Our trip to Bali was a trip I will NEVER forget, he embraced everything.  We missioned around Bali for 3-weeks taking him sightseeing almost every day; from hiring bikes to boat trips, to visiting temples, rice terraces, elephant sanctuaries and waterfalls to swimming, snorkelling, playing golf, to trying new foods and saying hello and thank you in Indonesian.  He still remembers Roxy the elephant and swimming with turtles like it was yesterday.

From this trip we confidently decided this was going to be the start of many long-haul trips to show our son the world…or so we thought. Sadly, the year 2020 had other ideas!!