Why start a travel blog in the middle of a global pandemic?

“Live a day worth writing about”. @thebucketlistfamily

I understand that talking about travel right now is a contentious issue. There seem to be two reactions when I mention travel; those who can’t bear to hear it – and those who need to satisfy their cravings for travel by lapping up every travel vlog, blog, book and Instagram photo they can find. Early in lockdown 2020, I was in the former group. I have since moved to the latter. I have this need to connect with the world outside, to feel that sense of perspective and grounding you achieve through travel and to continue researching travel destinations in my tenacious quest for hope.

After almost a year of lockdown, I’d reached my breaking point. The frustration built up inside me and I exploded in a flood of tears. I sat on the sofa and utterly sobbed. I’ve cried a lot in the last year. I recently learnt that humans are the only species to cry actual tears. And through these emotional tears, we release higher levels of stress hormones. It is our body’s response to dealing with stress. A tap to let out the emotions when your bowl is full.

The next day, with a clear head for the first time in ages, I watched a video about journaling. This is when I had my lightbulb moment. I think of it now as a sort of epiphany.  I needed to write about the travel experiences we’d had together, and why we did them. For me, for our children and maybe even for others. For the last few years we’ve been travelling pretty fast. In fact, we recently worked out that we’d squeezed in twenty weeks of travel in three years, whilst working and schooling full time.

I’d had this voice inside my head telling me “you must keep going, while you still can.”

I wasn’t sure what was around the corner, but from experience, we’d learned that still being here ‘around the corner’ cannot be taken for granted.

We live by Rhino’s wisest words ‘these are the days’.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that thing around the corner would be a global pandemic. It is slightly haunting when I look back now, and realise that voice was there for a reason. And I often wonder, whose voice it was. I realised I had a wealth of experience inside me and memories that had given me strength and happiness in the hardest of times. Experiences and memories of travel. And by writing our stories, I could forever capture these memories for our children. Before we forget the memories, before our time is up.

Writing our travel stories has been a cathartic experience. It has been a much needed vehicle for self expression, and a form of therapy for me. We’re having so much fun with this too.

Sitting together as a family and mapping out the details of past trips has opened my eyes to how children’s memories work. They remember things differently. For example, they won’t remember a room we stayed in, but they will remember the pool. They won’t remember the view from the top of Marina Bay Sands, but they remember the slushy they drank at the top. These little details are just as important as the big ones.

In fact, to them, these are the big things.

And then there’s the photos. We don’t print enough photos, even though we take many (well, mostly Rhino on that one). They’re all sitting there on a hard drive, but we just don’t view them enough. Many a time the girls have said they don’t remember a destination and on seeing one photo, it all comes flooding back. So, as well as enjoying looking forward to travel when the time is right, there is great pleasure to be had in looking back. Since we’re all pretty much feet planted in one spot for now, that’s what we decided to do.

As soon as the idea came to me, I was hooked. I had never written like this before. In fact, I hadn’t ever really written before. And with each story I wrote, I felt like I was back in the moment. Scootering through the balmy climes of Bali or lapping up the fresh Portuguese ocean breeze. A tsunami of memories and ideas overwhelmed me, and filled me with excitement. And I felt an incredible sense of fulfilment. With a few stories under my belt, I reached out to a few friends who encouraged me to keep going with this crazy idea I’d had.

And that’s where this blog was born. 

I am incredibly hopeful that life will allow us to travel freely again one day. And hopefully that day is not too far away. The last year has been hard for us all, and for some it has been harder than for others. We have developed resilience, patience and strength by living through a pandemic, and none more so than the little ones.

My eyes fill with tears of pride and of sadness when I see how well children have coped with the past year, and how terribly they have suffered, too. They have learned many lessons about themselves, that they probably don’t even realise yet. They have developed crisis-coping qualities like bravery, that will be a part of them and shape them for life.

Similar qualities can be developed through experiences of travel. When we push ourselves out of our comfort zone and really learn about the truths of the wider world.

Life is one big lesson and we are all merely students trying to understand it.

So, the ideas started flowing, like lava from a volcano, and before I knew it, I had created this website, an Instagram account and I was committed. Planning our travels has pretty much been a full time obsession, an outlet, for me over the last few years and without even that during lockdown, there was this void within me that needed to be filled. I have learned so much about travel and planning family travel, that I felt I had knowledge that might be useful to others too. And Rhino has so many stories of surf travel that we simply don’t want to forget.

By publicly committing to this project, I am also committing to myself. Making a promise to keep writing.

And a promise to making my journey through life interesting enough to write about. 

I have always had an energy and enthusiasm for life and I am most definitely a glass-is-half-full kind of person. I can also be obsessive about things I undertake (this blog has certainly highlighted that!) Through my very early and very limited experience with this project, I have also learned a valuable life lesson, one I hope will inspire our children too.

YES WE CAN!

By being brave enough to venture out of my comfort zone, I have realised that I, and all of us, have skills and creativity within us to realise any dream, if we truly believe we can. We just need to open our eyes and see them. Then make that leap of faith. 

So for now, I’ll keep on writing, travel vlog watching, blog reading, Insta scrolling, travel cooking and patiently dreaming of adventure …. for all things in life are temporal, including this pandemic.