This year I’m all about seeing as much as I can of the world, and that means the UK as well as travelling further afield because there’s so much of this country that I haven’t seen yet and so much that I have seen but want to explore more. I have lots of plans this year to really maximise the time that we have off work and the budget that we have available so I thought I’d share a few of them with you today…
First up, I’m going to take advantage of any travelling that I’m lucky enough to do with work by using time I have available before or after meetings to explore wherever I am. London is a prime example as I do often have a few hours spare before my train leaves to explore. In the past, I’ve not really done much exploring on trips like this where time is short but I’ve recently heard about Bounce luggage storage in London which gives you the opportunity to leave your bags near Kings Cross station – exactly where I arrive and depart from.
This was my last trip to London – imagine dragging this around the sights!
It means I can leave my luggage and explore without having to lug my suitcase around with me which if I’m honest is the reason why I know the inside of Kings Cross station better than most – rather than explore with my suitcase, I generally just sit with a cup of tea in one of the station cafes until my train is due to depart. Sad, I know.
I also travel to Manchester and Edinburgh sometimes so my plan is to do similar, even sometimes booking a slightly later train home so I can fit in more exploring.
And because there’s so much of the UK we want to see this year, we’ve set ourselves a mini target of visiting one (at least) new National Trust or English Heritage property every month this year.
We’ve been to all of our local ones as we have annual passes so we’re challenging ourselves to travel a little bit further afield this year and see what else we can discover.
I’ll keep you updated on how we get on!
Another way that I plan to see more of the world is by doing a few extreme day trips. I shared a bit about my first extreme day trip last month as I found our day trip to Alicante super exhausting (although it was a great day) and wasn’t sure if I would be doing many more of these kind of day trips.
I think we’ll be a lot cleverer when we book anywhere this year and will be looking for flights that are (a) closer to home for us so we don’t need to get up in the middle of the night, (b) not super early flights going out and late ones coming back as we’ve learned that we’d rather have less time where we’re going than be exhausted and (c) shorter flights than the 2.5 hours flight we did to Alicante.
This was our December extreme day trip to Alicante!
So, our planned day trips for this year are Belfast and Dublin which are both places we’d love to visit with regular flights from our local airport. There’s some great deals for return flights starting at around £39 return so we’ll be booking a couple of those this year when the weather starts to improve.
We’ll also be clever about where we book our main holiday too this year as we want to book somewhere that can be used as a base for exploring like we did last year. We’re not ones to sit around a pool for long so last year, we travelled to Lake Garda and used that as a base for visiting Venice, Milan, Verona and travelling around the lake itself.
We’ve booked the flights for our Summer holiday with the kids (they were in the sale so we didn’t want to wait and lose the bargain price) and we already know that we’ll be doing some exploring during that week but haven’t decided what we’ll be doing exactly yet so watch this space for that.
I am determined to squeeze in as much travel as I can this year and will use every way I can think of do it – whether it’s using companies like Bounce for storing luggage when I just have a short time to explore, booking cheap flights with budget airlines or being clever with where we go. It’s all going to add up to a great year adventuring together!
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