Travel

In order to save money this year, I wasn't planning on taking many holidays. Perhaps even doing some "staycations", to borrow a term coined in the tight-times US, taking time off and not doing much, maybe doing some day trips within the Netherlands. But things change and now I have a long weekend to Stockholm planned with M in July. I'm quite looking forward to it, especially since I've not really been to any of Scandinavia yet and I'm eager to visit that part of Europe.

It is quite freaky, as someone at work pointed out, that this trip is almost twice as far in the future as M and I have been seeing each other, but it has felt like a very long couple of months, in a good way. I remember how not quite a year ago I was with a couple of friends, all of us single, and we were discussing travelling on our own, something I was a bit afraid of despite having just travelled alone for two whole months. I guess it was that Australia felt quite easy and safe, whereas, thinking of where I wanted to go in Europe, I did think about things like the language and what I would feel comfortable doing on my own and how predatory men there would be. I had travelled to Florence on my own years ago and got a bit tired of men chatting to me when I would have liked to have just been left alone. So one of the friends I was talking with sent around some websites she knew of that organized trips for groups, which I thought would be ideal, like the tours I took in Australia, get to meet some new people and have various activities planned. It looks like I won't need those websites though in the near future at least, and I ended up going on only one trip on my own when I went to Mallorca last year (which was a great trip). And actually, all three of us who were discussing single travel a year ago are single no longer.