1) I love to travel to new places.
2) The family trait of loving photography has passed down to me.
I had always imagined that during university I would travel, seek new places and new experiences, but when I arrived I felt so at home that I didn't want to go anywhere.
Roll on January 2016.
I began to feel that sense of panic, the end of my first year was in sight and I hadn't even travelled outside the city. I was never going to travel England, let alone all the countries on my bucket list! So I sat down, took a deep breath and started researching for holidays. Little did I know that all the forces would combine to create what I will tentatively call 'The Best Summer Ever'.
After weeks of searching, involving creating algorithms and ranking systems (I take this very seriously you see) in order to find a trip that was best for cost, duration and countries visited, I decided to take part in TopDeck's 13 day 'East Meets West' tour. The tour starts in Budapest, stopping over in Vienna, Krakow, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam and finishing in London. While it is only 13 days my aim was to get a flavour of what Europe has to offer to help me decide if I should return in future.
While I was deep in my planning my newfound university friends decided that they also wanted to cement our kinship by going on holiday. Many conversations then ensued in trying to decide a place that we all wanted to visit, after much deliberation we settled on Berlin. Whilst I was already travelling there with TopDeck, I knew that Berlin had so much culture, history and of course nightlife, that I would not be able to complete it all in in my short stay.
I could go on and explain how each of my other holidays came into existence but I don't want to bore people on my first post. So instead I'll just summarise my final itinerary for the summer, in order:
1) Berlin, with university friends
2) TopDeck's East Meets West, solo travelling (more information can be found on TopDeck's website: https://www.topdeck.travel/tours/east-meets-west)
3) Cornwall, with extended family
4) Choir Tour of Ontario, with Holy Trinity Church Choir, Stratford Upon Avon.
5) Malta, with my immediate family
As you can see, it's a lot to fit in this Summer. I knew I wanted to record all the memories from my trips in a travel journal a friend gifted me for my birthday, but I didn't know how to store all the photos I'd be taking. Then when I was procrastinating from my end of year exams I ended up on travel blogs and it just fitted, it was the perfect way to present everything.
In addition to this summer, in 2017 I will be upping and moving again for the Year Abroad section of my uni course. I am in equal parts excited and... bricking it. Whilst there is no fixed location as of this moment, I know that wherever I go, it will go in the blink of an eye so I want to be sure to put all the memories down.
So here I am.
I don't know who's going to read this or if in fact, anyone will, but I'll be posting photos from each of the places I visit, if not for anyone else then for me and my memories.
Tori
x
