Over here in England it won't be long until the schools break up for the summer holidays. As a child, my parents always aimed to take me and my sister somewhere for the holidays for at least two out of the six weeks. It meant that we got to do something fun, spend time together as a family, and sometimes we got to see a bit of the world. We went to France, Spain, Greece and our best holiday was a trip around America for the whole of the six week summer holiday that included Disney Land. For a British kid growing up in the early nineties, a trip to Disney Land was like Christmas! My parents weren't exactly rolling in it and we grew up in an area where no one really had much money, so now that I'm older I really appreciate the efforts that our parents made for us. Oh and having an Irish mum meant that we spent many, many holidays in Ireland especially Cork.
What were your summer holidays like and did you visit any cool places?
I reckon I did most of the holiday type things that most British people do during the summer as a kid: Caravan in Clacton, trips to Brighton or Bournemouth, Butlins, holidays to Devon and Cornwall. But it was our first visit to Spain when I was a child that got me hooked on travel. Even though I was very young I could see that the lifestyle and culture was very different to anything I'd ever known and I have to say, I've definitely been bitten by the travel bug and never miss the opportunity to travel to strange and foreign climes! And now that I live in America, I'm having a great time travelling around the country which is almost like visiting a series of different countries because a lot of the states are so very different!
I grew up in India and as is the case with many Indians, we do not do holidays as such. Even if we have time off we tend to spend time with the family, and if we do go away we visit areas where we have family members so that we can spend time with them. But that doesn't mean that the time we got off from school was boring. Not at all. We always had friends to play with, visits to the cinema, the beachside or mountains if we lived near to there. For us the most important was who we are with. Not where we are!
But after saying all that, since leaving college and getting a job I have had more travel opportunities and I am loving it. I have visited countries I could only dream of seeing, and now that I live in the US, there is so much of this great country that I am getting to know and I am really enjoying it.
We usually holidayed in Europe most commonly France, Spain or Greece which is quite typical for someone from Britain. I have lots of fond memories of holidays when I was young with my family. I'm a mum of two who lives in Australia now so Europe is a bit too far to visit ever year although I would dearly love to. But I do try to keep the tradition of family holidays alive for my two who are still very young. We've had great fun exploring much of Australia, been to NZ, Fiji and hopefully when they're a little older, I'd love to take them to Asia. Thailand is definitely on the 'to visit' memo! I hope that my children will grow up to have happy memories of family holidays the way I do.
We always did something for summer vacay but we never went out of the country. It was just easier, more convenient and less expensive to drive to where we wanted to go. So we vacayed all along the west coast, went to Arizona, It was basically a pretty long road trip stopping off at lots of places along the way. But we did fly to Hawaii once. That was pretty cool. It's because we didn't do trips outside of the country that as I grew older I really wanted to travel and see more of life outside of America. A few years ago I got to go to Europe and really, really loved it!
I'm very lucky that as a child, my parents were in a position to take me abroad most years for the summer. So we've visited France, Spain, Greece, Italy, and America among lots of other places. For things like half-term break, we tended to stay in Britain which was just as good because we saw lots of very interesting places that were right here on our doorstep that we otherwise wouldn't have known about. Because of all this I have a real interest in travel. My children are tiny but my husband and I make a real effort to take them around the country and they've even been abroad a handful of times - would have been more if it wasn't for Covid! I really want to give my kids the same kind of upbringing I had give them that thirst for travel and exploration.
We mostly holidayed in Scotland and Ireland as that's where my parents are from. They didn't have much need for foreign holidays and preferred to visit family and see 'home.' I was about 17 when I had my first real holiday (sorry but going to see your relatives isn't always a holiday!) as I went to Spain with my friends. Since then I've been to Spain a few times and America as well with my husband and kids and those are our two fave destinations so we tend to go there a lot. There's so much to see in both countries so they are places that you can keep going back to and it never gets old. And I'm also pleased that we got to introduce our kids to travel at a young age.
LOL! Ireland, Ireland, and Ireland! LOL! Both my parents are Irish and are from different parts of Ireland. There were four of us kids growing up and my parents really didn't have a lot of money. So exotic holidays were out of the question. But we'd go away once or twice a year to Ireland because it was the most affordable and of course and more importantly so that we could see family.
I love Ireland. It really is a very beautiful country and I feel so at home there which is only natural I suppose considering it is my second home and I've spent loads of time out there. But it's because we only ever went to the one place that I wanted to see more of the world. So when I got older and started earning my own money, I did a lot more travelling with one of the first places I went to being South Africa more than twenty years ago now, which shocked a lot of people as it's so far away and completely different to anything I'd been used to. But it was an amazing experience and definitely wet my appetite for more travel.
I grew up in the Pacific NW in America wear we have some of the most beautiful landscapes. And like a lot of kids who grew up in that region we had a lot of camping trips and beach holidays. So I grew up with a real love for the outdoors and outdoorsy stuff like hiking, kayaking. Stuff like that. Sometimes we went out of state to NY because both my parents are from there so we would sometimes go to see family who still lived out there altho now most of them have moved out of state and alot of them are in WA wear I am from and wear i still live. I haven't been to NY for many years but I would love to go again and show my husband the places I went to as a kid.
We sometimes went to France for a few days during the summer which was always very exciting. And we'd had a holiday to both Spain and Greece one time each which we really enjoyed. But we mostly spent our holidays somewhere in Britain either camping or staying in B&Bs. My most memorable holiday was when we went to Devon as my nan came along too and that was the last holiday we ever had with her and I'm so glad that we all had an absolutely amazing time.
There were five of us growing up and we didn't have much in the way of money, so exotic foreign trips were pretty much out of the question. Our holidays were mainly in England and we tended to visit family members in other parts of the country or borrow my nan's caravan and go caravanning. There were a few camping trips and beachy-type holidays to Skegness which is the most exotic it got! We did have a holiday in Butlins once which was like all our Christmases came at once. But even though we had limited funds, my parents always tried to make it as fun and as memorable as they could for us. You don't need oodles of cash - just lots of imagination. I got to travel out of the country as I got older, but I always have fond memories of our family holidays.
If we were to go abroad, then we'd always go to see relatives we barely knew who lived in other countries. So without meaning to sound rude, it was never much of a holiday. 😣 It was really a chance for our parents to see relatives that they didn't normally get to see and of course now that I'm much older, I get it. But when you're a kid, it's incredibly boring to be sat among a group of adults who just want to sit there nattering away instead of going out and doing' fun stuff'. It might have been ok if we were just there for the two weeks but we stayed for the entire six weeks that we were off from school, so I'm willing to bet that they were sick of the sight of us too!
Holidays got much better once I met the man, and I treasure the memories of places we've been fortunate to visit together.
I have to say it but my sister and I have been well-travelled from a very young age starting with when we moved to France when we were tiny. We spent a lot of our holidays visiting family all over Britain and Ireland, but we also visited most of Europe during our course of living in France, and holidayed in Australia and NZ as well. We also have family in America so I spent quite a few summers out there which was always nice and we would do things like camp or go horse riding.
We did of course sometimes spend part of our summers in France but I'm really glad that our parents aimed to take us out of the country so that we could see life in other parts of the world. And at such a young age, that's an education in itself. It's instilled a love of travel in me and I really do think that my family have travel in their blood.