Oh Sugar Honey Ice Tea!

The day has finally arrived.

The day that I get up, get ready and go on an adventure.

At the moment, it doesn't feel quite real. It's almost as if it's happening to someone else, maybe I'm watching a movie or reading a book and REALLY identify with the main character, or maybe this is just a very vivid dream and I'll wake up shortly thinking wow that was terrifying.

I was speaking with Flyfour about it, and asked if he thought I would snap into it before I got lost in Paris. I'm not sure if he was joking or not, but he said he thought I'd realised once I got back what I had done. Friends at work have been reminding me to enjoy and to be safe, and Cara, gave me some very important advice;

Being Open

If I say "that poem by Larkin" you know the one I mean right? It's called This Be The Verse, and I think most people know the first couple of lines.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

Well, my parents truly did a number on me.

A Midlife Crisis

A few weeks ago I started joking that I was having a midlife crisis and wanted to go backpacking around Europe this Summer.

It really was a joke, the last thing I wanted to do was stay in a load of Hostels on my own, wearing last week's knickers and trying to converse in a language that I was unfamiliar with, whilst trying to pretend that I wasn't a 43-year-old woman having a midlife crisis.

Only the more I joked about it, the more I started wanting to go and realising that actually, this want for an adventure, teamed with the loss of my Mum earlier this year probably is a midlife crisis and if I treated it as a period of growth, that maybe I could come out the other side a better person.

There were two things that swung my decision to go.