Travel in midlife and onwards – getting the most from it

As promised this is my second rather reflective post on the theme of what 2024 taught me. Today though I’m also looking at lessons from the travel experiment that we’ve been playing around with over the last few years so that I can write this ‘travel in midlife and onwards post’ properly. Somebody told me this weekend that I think too much, that I should just get on and live life forwards – and even though it was said in jest, I chewed it over for a while (and yes I get the irony of thinking about thinking too much!). But then I came across Carl Jung writing about midlife in his 1931 essay, The Stages of Life. He suggested that, “for a young person it is almost a sin to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person it is a duty and necessity to devote serious attention to himself.”

So I’m going with him, not my jocular friend, and I make no apologies for being a bit serious about the subject of travel in midlife and onwards today because it’s a big outlay, woven with hopes and dreams. I’m sure most of us have had that experience of coming back from a trip that didn’t live up to our expectations. One of my closest friends spent last winter looking forward to a Greek Island hopping trip last summer, she was reliving her favourite journey from her youth. When she came back I expected her to be bubbling over but instead she said she felt like she’d spent the whole time trying really hard to enjoy it as much as she’d thought she would – somehow she just couldn’t capture the joy she’d anticipated.

The thing is that we might think that we know what we like by now, after all we’ve been taking holidays for long enough but as Jung says, “we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will in the evening become a lie.” As you may have gathered I’m reappraising everything in that light right now – work, travel, blogging, friendships, how we live and where… it feels like the right time to do it.

So, travel. I think for a lot of us, the joy of having more free time ahead at this stage of life includes travel. The thing is that however much of a homebird you are, sometimes you need to interrupt your experience of it in order to appreciate it anew. We all have our preferred ways of doing it, methods of transport and types of accommodation. We have our specific interests too and often focus our trips around these, be it sport, history, wildlife, food… but how can we be sure that our known way is the best way?

Travel in midlife and onwards – a project

In 2022/23 we pitched for and won a particularly big retail contract, it was a lot of work but the payoff was that we had a big budget for fun. We wanted to use it intentionally and so we came up with a project of testing different types of travel within a limited timeframe so that we could compare them and decide once and for all what we enjoy most. I was being strategic about travel but I was also approaching it from a later life perspective.

Why we did it

You see one of the many advantages of having siblings who are 20, 18 and 13 years older than me is that I get a kind of movie trailer of what might lie ahead. I often talk about it from a health perspective – they’ve made me aware of what my genes hold for me in terms of the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, macular degeneration and other time bombs that I work hard to prevent. But they also help me to see how my mindset might change. They’ve all been big travellers but over recent years they’ve done less and each one of them has specifically said to me, “you most likely have ten to fifteen years of high energy travel in you, so don’t waste the opportunity to go to the places you most want to see.” All three of them are at the point where for various reasons they find long haul flying takes a huge toll on the body and that’s understandable, I found the 17 hour flight to Thailand last year hard work, especially for a week. And so their experience is helping me to prioritise, I’m sidelining most of my European dreams for my later years and bringing high energy adventure travel forward.

It’s only now that we’re getting the chance to spread our wings – we didn’t have the heady courtship period before children that most couples do. During the family years, travel for us was really about a change of routine. I think it’s the same for a lot of people when their children are young. You can’t really call it a holiday because unless you’re on a luxury budget where you can send them off to supervised activities during the day, you have to keep them entertained. When the boys were little, our trips were about loading the car with camping equipment, travelling through France for three weeks and letting them run wild. I have so many happy memories of those times but I look back and see it must have been exhausting. We had two August birthdays in the mix as well so I had to hide everything for celebrations in amongst the packing – sometimes it felt like we had our whole world in the back of our Chrysler Voyager!

It felt like such a luxury when we started having holidays at our beloved Yellow Villa in Kalkan. We had beds, bedrooms, our own pool but even then I remember one day in particular when they’d been squabbling and I was trudging up the hill in the heat with bags of food for a barbecue. I turned to Mal and said, ‘we’ve worked so hard for this but right now it doesn’t feel like a holiday.’ It was just a moment, we loved our times in Kalkan but self-catering is never a complete escape, even if you eat out in the evenings you still have to keep the fridge stocked.

And I just have to add this photo in because it’s from the middle one’s 16th birthday, we were heading out for dinner but he wanted to be at home with his friends, not on holiday with us. One of those moments that now makes me chuckle (I really hadn’t worked out what suited me then either had I?)

Understanding what we loved

When the boys moved into their adult lives, they left us with a globe and dreams to plan – but actually we didn’t have a clue about what we really wanted to do. There’s the whole wide world to see but with my siblings’ message about having about fifteen years left and prioritising what I want to do most, I had to whittle things down. And there were the questions of not only ‘where do we want to go?’ but ‘how do we want to travel?’ And so that’s where the project came in because if we were going to experiment and try some things we might not like, we wanted to do it while we were earning – making mistakes with our pension is something we’d rather avoid. So since lockdown we’ve travelled a lot, too much, but it’s been valuable because we’ve learned a lot from it. Here’s a rundown of what we’ve done since 2020.

Long haul

• The Caribbean (3 x Sandals resorts)
• Kenya (African safari + beach extension)
• Thailand katamaran island hopping (me on my own)

All inclusive

• Turkey – Club Marvy

Family self-catering

• Kalkan X 2

Touring

• Geneva – Dijon (la route des grand vins)
• Alicante – Valencia (coast, mountains and cities)
• Crete – Ios – Mykonos (Greek Island hopping)
• Santorini – Naxos – Paxos (Greek Island hopping)

City breaks

• Amsterdam X 2 (summer and winter)
• Porto (with friends)
• Valencia (for Fallas)
• Dijon (to see the youngest)

UK

Hotels

• Lake District
• Haworth
• Middleham

Festivals

• Margate
• Leeds
• Halifax
• London

City breaks

• London
• Edinburgh
• Glasgow (with friends)
• Newcastle (a lot!)

Fitness break

• Anglesey

Luxury camping

• Cornwall

A note on press trips

Yes it’s been a lot and some excursions have been blog related so I just want to add a note on press trips. As somebody who works as a marketing consultant but also blogs as a hobby I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to earn some of our trips in return for giving brands strategic feedback and also writing or Instagramming about the experience. I’m offered opportunities that make a lot of people I know and love visibly spit with anger. And I understand, if you’re a nurse who works long shifts or a teacher dealing with all the stresses of modern education… it doesn’t seem fair. But although I’m not standing at a frontline like that, I do work too – and I’ve spent countless hours building up this blog in my free time.

I’m really grateful for the experiences that I’ve had but I’ve learned that although they sound glamorous, press trips aren’t always what they seem from the outside. The thing is that in exchange for your travel, you give your ‘self’ (and your partner) – for 24 hours a day, for as long as you’re there. You are almost always accompanied by a representative of the business who is there, understandably, to make sure they get value from you. Your itinerary is filled from early in the morning until late at night and you have no say over what you do when you’re there. There is very little time off in the destination and you have a contract to fulfil so even if something difficult happens such as The Queen dying or you going down with food poisoning, you have to keep delivering regardless. And you are seen more as staff rather than guests, you have to do as you’re told. Plus you have to deal with envy from people you know and people online which is rarely delivered nicely. As a result I now turn down nearly all fully funded press trips. I’ll never say never but given that we have to take that time away from our business and billing, we’ve decided that it’s better to pay our own way and have our own time.

What we learned from our experiment

Moving on. We looked hard at our travel outcomes while we were doing our life review last month and in light of last week’s blog post, you won’t be surprised to hear that the first conclusion we came to was about keeping the extraordinary special. Just as with our year of music, we could see how jaded we became by being on the move constantly… sick of packing… sick of airports… sick of being out of control of diet and exercise and sick of not keeping on top of things at home. So lesson one for our retirement was about keeping travel very carefully phased so that it remains exciting and something to look forward to. Lesson two was a surprise. The thing we’ve always enjoyed most is travelling around from place to place under our own steam. But looking back, the two breaks that stood out for both of us from our experiment were our summer week in Amsterdam and the wild card that we both thought we wouldn’t be keen on, the all-inclusive ten days at Club Marvy.

When we broke it down, Amsterdam was great because we loved staying in an Airbnb that was somebody’s home in a residential area, walking everywhere and really getting to grips with the city. There was culture that gripped us – great art and a lot of WW2 related exhibits, plus our friend Greetje to visit. We settled in and by the time we left we felt part of the place. We were lucky though that we had a blissfully hot and sunny week, maybe it would have felt different in the rain.

Thinking more about Club Marvy, we went when we were feeling quite burnt out after our summer of music. It was good for me because it was remote so I had no feeling that we ought to be out exploring and as we’re very familiar with Turkish culture, I didn’t feel I was missing anything. I also loved the prepaid element, not feeling remotely guilty about ordering a second sunset cocktail or choosing a bit of everything for dinner. And I loved not having to think at all, as we pre-booked our restaurants as soon as we arrived we didn’t even need to make a decision about where to eat. I was the most relaxed I’ve ever been and I loved being able to turn inwards and focus on nothing more than books, sunshine and Mal.

Surprisingly, the trips we feel less enthusiastic about in hindsight are the ones that followed our supposedly favourite format – travelling around from place to place. It’s only when we look back that we realise how much they take out of us although maybe it will be different when we retire and don’t have to go straight back to work afterwards. However for me it was proof that the experiment was worth it – going back to Jung’s concept it shows that what was great in the morning may be little in the evening – things change and if we hadn’t done this we’d probably have kept on travelling to the same touring formula.

I’ve realised how much better a destination is when you have a purpose around it. Going to Haworth to see the Bronte Parsonage and the Hockney exhibition at Saltaire was much more engaging than our leisure breaks in The Lakes or Cornwall, even though the accommodation wasn’t as nice. Ditto the safari experience over the Caribbean. All of this is really helping us to narrow our wishlist down – the thing is that the whole world is enticing at face value but you have to find the places that will leave you with extra depth to your memories. It’s important that you find your own meaning though rather than following the crowd.

Probably our least favourite place of all the ones we’ve visited is Santorini, we should have stuck with our instincts and avoided it. It’s so over-photographed that the reality can’t match up to the curated images – and it’s so overcrowded that you can’t move (and it does feel bad saying that in light of the troubles that the people there are going through at the moment but when we spoke to locals they all expressed frustration at the overtourism). I’ve had similar disappointments with landmarks that haven’t lived up to my imagination – the Taj Mahal, The Statue of Liberty… and both of those were in the 90s, long before Instagram. So I think there’s something about discovery, in going to a place that sparks your mind rather than somewhere you’ve seen pictures of others going to and feel you ought to tick off.

Working out your whys

If travel is something that’s important to you as you look ahead, it’s worth thinking about it forensically. We’ve estimated that we have the capacity and budget for 5-7 long haul trips so we want to get them as right as we can. I’m trying to understand my whys. Why that place? Why that itinerary? Why that type of accommodation? And for me it’s been interesting to see that if I try to fit too much in, I ruin it. That really has been my lesson for life in general recently.

What next?

 

So now it’s time to say that we’re heading off on a big adventure next week – probably the biggest we’ll ever have. When I was looking at opportunities for celebration over the next few years that might be good times for our big trips, I realised we have three: our silver wedding in 2026, my 60ᵗʰ in 2027 and Mal’s 60th in 2030. The silver wedding and my birthday fall quite close together and so we’re taking this big trip now in the hope that we can save again for a birthday celebration. It makes sense because it’s our 24ᵗʰ wedding anniversary on Monday which means that Tuesday marks the beginning of our 25ᵗʰ year of being married.

So we’ve timed it so that we set off on the first day of our 25ᵗʰ year and we’ll be away for three weeks in total. I’ll admit now that I planned the trip before I’d done this travel analysis and so I can see that in my usual style, I’ve put too much into the schedule. Two of our weeks of travelling are under our own steam but the focus of the trip is a week in the middle where we’ve been invited to learn something new. We’re going a long way to a country that may be a bit scary, there will be challenges with high altitudes, wet weather and a week of high physical output. But it’s a place that isn’t heavily visited and we’ll be learning a new version of something we love doing so I feel excited.

Before we head off I want to be transparent about the funding. We’ve paid for everything ourselves apart from the experience in the middle so it doesn’t feel like a press trip and I think there will be a good balance. I’ll be moving over to Instagram Stories which will also appear on Facebook so I really hope you’ll come along with me – as you know, video isn’t my comfort zone so I always love having blog readers to tell me if I’m doing ok. With Mal in the mix I suspect there will be some very funny moments as well as a few gruelling ones (but hopefully they won’t be Mal related!). And I can chat to you there as I go along.

On the blog front I’m going to use my new Remarkable (best tech gadget I’ve ever bought – thanks to everyone who gave advice) to write a diary as we go along which I’ll try to publish here every few days. It’ll be a bit like going back to the old days of blogging, regular and personal, so keep an eye open for posts or subscribe below if you want to know when there are updates. It was Midlifechic’s 11th birthday this week and so it feels good to have the creative challenge of a new way of writing for a while. Before all of that begins though there will be a regular post next Friday.

Will there be any outfit inspiration? Maybe, in a limited way – you see I have to allow for three completely different climates so if I can whittle it down from the piles I have pending it will be a good way of looking at capsule packing. That’s Sunday’s challenge, I can’t leave the bedroom until it’s done. So now I must go and do the thousand things that have to be finished before I leave. I hope this travel thinking has been helpful for you – we need to do whatever we can to enjoy this next stage of life to the full and with that in mind I’ll end with another midlife reflection from Carl Jung:

“After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself.”

The thought of this being our golden hour is a lovely association with our stage of life. Remember that it’s your turn now to start living as you want to, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says. Think hard about what gives you pleasure and meaning – and start building your time around it as much as you can.

PS Don’t miss these trousers

I just have a couple of things that I want to add before we go. First of all I wanted to give you a heads up on these trousers because they’ve just arrived in store, I’ve bought them and they’re fantastic. They’re a really interesting jeans/trouser hybrid. The fabric is a lyocell/cotton blend and so they have lovely drape and yet there’s a bit of the denim stiffness that stops them from feeling too dressy. You’ll notice there’s a proper trouser button rather than a jeans stud fastening and there are slip pockets. As soon as they arrived I turfed two pairs out of my suitcase so that I could take them with me. They’re such a great price that I know they’ll sell out as soon as the fashion press discover them. I bought the 12R and they’re exactly the right length for wearing with trainers but there are also long and petite sizes available – plus there’s a light caramel colourway if you prefer something darker.

Cotton rich wide leg trousers

PPS Save the date

And this is where I need a fanfare. You may remember that a while ago I asked if anyone would be interested in a reader overnighter – a little get together where we could have a meal together and chat properly. About 200 of you said tentatively that you would so I have a prospective date for you. Saturday 9th August… somewhere in Birmingham city centre. The very wonderful Elaine who regularly pops up in the comments is helping to organise it and she’s busy trying to find a venue – if any of you have contacts in the hotel industry or thoughts on good places, please do let me know.

The idea is that we’ll arrive at lunchtime, there will be an optional guided tour of the National Trust Back to Back properties for anyone who’d like to learn about Birmingham’s history, we’ll then get together back at the hotel. My buddy Claudia Bradby will give us a talk on building a jewellery wardrobe and she and I will have one of our open chats with opportunities for you to ask us questions… about anything really. There will be lots of Claudia’s jewellery for you to play around with and then we’ll have drinks and dinner. The next day we’ll have breakfast and then you can either head home or go into Birmingham city centre – we’ll have lots of ideas of things you can do if you’d like to explore for a while.

So hold the date for now and as soon as I have more information I’ll tell you. We know not everyone who showed interest will be able to make it so we’re going to reserve about 30 rooms and take it from there. It should be a really lovely weekend though with new friends to be made, the start of many maybe – I really hope you can come along.

Ok that’s me done, I’m off to finish packing. Don’t forget there will be a normal post next Friday and then a travel diary from far, far away. See you at the other side!

Disclosure: ‘Travel in midlife and onwards – getting the most from it’ is not a sponsored post

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