Hello!

One of my goals for this year was to take a little trip somewhere new with my boyfriend every month – this hasn’t worked out because I prioritised life things like saving to upgrade my car and now saving to move out, but since passing my driving test this week (it still feels so surreal just to say it!) I’ve got a whole new lease of inspiration that I thought I’d share.

Now that I’m not bound by trains or being too far to walk or anywhere, the whole country feels so much more accessible. Next week, the boy and I are going to see his family in Basingstoke then going up to Reading to view some properties for moving, then a couple of weeks later we’re going up to York to see my god-mother and her kids.

I had so many elaborate (and expensive) plans for the year – I wanted to go to Amsterdam in July, Santorini in September and Berlin in December and I don’t even think if I hadn’t bought a car or moved I’d have been able to do that. But there’s still so many places I’ve never seen in the UK that I feel even more excited to see.

Being new to driving, I’m obviously not going to be doing trips right down South to Cornwall or all the way up to Scotland, but places within a couple of hours drive and not too many hundreds of miles is definitely achievable!

The first place that springs to mind is Brighton – my main experience of the city is from the YouTubers I follow that live there but it seems like such a vibrant and quirky city and I really want to go and experience it myself.

I definitely want to spend more time in Bournemouth – with my sister at uni there I really have no excuse but there’s an arcade just off the beach front that is somewhere I could spend literally hours and Bournemouth beach is the nicest beach on the South Coast (I think anyway! I’ve not been to that many).

And there are other places that aren’t beach towns on the South Coast that start with B – I want to go to the National Space Centre in Leicester, I want to visit Bath, I’d love to see places like the Stone Henge and go back to Hadrian’s Wall and learn more about it. Britain is a country steeped in history and there’s so much to learn and I genuinely can’t wait to go see more of it in my little Hyundai.

That’s not to say I don’t want to travel further afoot – I really do want to see everything this world has to offer. I still want to go to Amsterdam, Santorini and Berlin, I want to visit my friend Emma in Texas, go see my family friends and cousin in New Zealand, I want to go to the Pokemon Centre in Japan with my boyfriend and more than anything I want to go back to New York and spend more time enjoying the city rather than rushing round trying to fit in as much as we could (though that was great too).

Travelling has been something that has been one of my main life ambitions since I first decided to go to Tanzania with Camps International in 2012 – spending a month there in 2013 showed me a small glimpse of what the world looks like and I’m going to spend the rest of my life seeing more and more.

But not right now. Travelling is more than long-haul flights to countries thousands of miles away. It’s about making memories with people you love and me, my boy and my little car are going to make so many memories.

Thank you so much for reading,

Sophie xx

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