I often find myself distracted by the most random things when I’m procrastinating. One day it will be Vietnamese recipes, the next it might be news stories from somewhere in South America. Anything to take my mind away from the things I’ve actually got to do! During one of these impromptu sessions something that really captivated me was the story of the Isleworth Mona Lisa. I had no idea about this earlier version of Mona Lisa, how it was essentially rediscovered just before the First World War in a home in London.
I didn’t get to travel when I was little. I barely even left London let alone head to other parts of the country. Neither of my parents drove, and everything we needed was around us, so that was that. It wasn’t until my teen years that I got adventurous and used to go with friends to other parts of the country, and started to take holidays and things like that.
I want different for my kids. I want different for myself too. I want to see things. I want to explore places. I want to take holidays to amazing places. I just want to experience more. My kids are 2 and 3 at the moment and times like this, when it’s almost impossible to travel anywhere outside of the country (without the risk of being quarantined for 2 weeks), means that I’m thinking even more about all of the places I want to go to once we’re out and life starts to resemble what things were like this time last year.
A few years ago – I think it was at the end of 2014 – me and my husband went to Paris for a long weekend. On the last day we were scheduled to go to La Louvre to see, among many things, Mona Lisa! In the end we decided that we were probably pushing it and that it was probably best if we stayed closer to the train station before we left, but it’s a huge regret that we didn’t time things a little better.
I’ve started building up a list of all of the places that I want to visit and this time I’ll go with real plans for each spot that I head to. It will be no surprise for you that I’ll also have plans for the kind of local cuisine that I want to sample while I’m out there. Most importantly – I’m going to make sure it’s done with my boys.
We’re going to build up to it; it’s definitely going to be a gradual process. First we will probably go to Paris (where we will go to Disneyland before we head into the city to see the most famous portrait in the world!), followed by Turkey (where we’re going to have great fun at one of their water parks) and then we’ve actually already got 2024 plans to go to Florida. After that you better believe that they are going to be with me the first time we have cha ca in Hanoi.
