The next adventure

At school I was voted "most likely to be in the Guinness Book of Records", which I was really pleased about. Unfortunately I've not made it in yet, but I have done a few odd things in my time. Age about 9 I decided one day to do 1000 cartwheels. For my 16th birthday I got a unicycle and taught myself unicycling. When I was 19 I had a fairly unconventional gap year, spending a few months in Palestine, and then the big one - that I went on about for quite a while in 2013 - was the bike ride to Kuwait.

Dan quit his job to do that one so after that trip we were planning the next crazy thing we could do once he got a job. The main idea was buying a shop, but we also considered fostering or buying llamas (not very seriously). You can read that blog here. but spoiler alert, we didn't do anything crazy we did what normal people our kind of age do: we bought a normal family house and had two children. It didn't go that smoothly... We first started looking for a house when I found out I was pregnant, we finally moved into our new house after 9 months of lodging with another family when Percy was two and I was pregnant again. But the point is that right now we are a pretty normal family of 4 living in a normal house doing normal jobs and we're just not quite normal enough to be ok with that.

I've got friends who moved with a baby to live and work in Marrakech, I've got friends that bought a house made from 9, 1 bed flats and turned it into one amazing house, and I've got a friend that lives in a self-converted horse box. This year my parents moved from the house they'd owned for 25 years to a house right on the River Weaver in Cheshire, and this weekend they bought a canal boat. Next week they're going to New Zealand for a month. I mean it's easy when you're in that jammy generation that ruined the world for us millennials. But still you don't need loads of money to do crazy fun stuff. A bit helps though.

So what's the next thing? Eric our youngest is 10 months old which is a full on kind of age where they can climb stairs badly and choke on everything, and they bang their heads about 5 times a day. But, by 18 months they start to be more like real people, he'll hopefully be off breastfeeding and have a bit more caution about things like stairs. He might even sleep through the night! So we're starting to see past that survival stage of life and think "what would be fun to do in 2019?" We haven't decided what the thing is yet, sorry if you were hoping for an exciting announcement... but the good news is we're open to suggestions.

Percy is an October birthday so he doesn't start school till Sept 2019 so we have a bit a chance to go somewhere or do something before he's locked into the confines of the acedemic year. We talked about renting some kind of Camper van and going on a big trip round Canada or maybe Northern Europe like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. Or maybe we'll stick to the bike thing and get a crazy bike like on of these:

We worked out if we bought this one and cycled to church in it every week instead of using the car, we would make back what we spend on petrol in just 42 short years!

This one can fit up to 11 people (although only 6 people cycle)

We'd have to be a lot less ambitious with how far we went on this kind of thing compared to a Camper van, but I reckon a super fun holiday would be cycling from Liverpool right across the country to like Hull or somewhere in an 11 person bike, where random strangers could hop on and join you for a few miles. Think of the people you'd meet and the sites you'd see! Introverted Dan is less thrilled with this idea!

Other options are going abroad to work just for a short term thing. There were several times when we talked about moving abroad long term, and I think Dan maybe still would, but for me right now after a massively long journey (emotionally) to get this house, I don't want to leave it properly any time soon. I could cope with a year in the Cook Islands though. That mystical place that we often talk about and Dan once said in his sleep just because he once enquired about a job there. And www.cookislandsjobs.com is still one of his most visited sites.

So I'm not sure what we'll do and on what scale it will be. The money to do this will come from "savings we might make in the future" so we don't really have a budget, but even if it's trying to get from Lands End to John O'Groats by public transport we'll do something. If you are reading this it is your job to hold us accountable for not getting old and boring. Thanks.