I’m back and here to stay, hopefully!

Hello all. It has been about a year since I last posted on here so I will give you a quick update. Obviously Covid-19 killed all travel and we all had to buckle down for the ride. Though Covid might be a thing of the past to many it is still affecting people all around the world. During that time I gave you a few highlight lists and a few good friends happily told us their story. So now I feel it only right to quickly tell you mine, then we can move back on the good stuff, travel!! I have had a few things in life I have wanted to pursue. One of those was to become a lecturer in Biblical studies. This was my first big dream alongside other smaller ones, like winning the lottery and living on a farm in the middle of nowhere with only sheep to talk to. Lacking the necessary funds to play the lottery I aimed at the former. I got my degree and soon after enrolled in a masters course, sadly the funding ran dry and I came the realisation, though I am rather intelligent, I didn’t have the right kind of intelligence to pursue a PHD and a life in academia at this time. I realised that was the case and enrolled into the Officer Training Corps with the British Army. Another dream came to a sudden end when it was discovered I had a rightward axis on my heart making me ineligible to continue training. These two dreams came to an end relatively close to one another. So I dug into the depths of my mind and remembered a passion for youth work. I had been volunteering for many years at a youth club and decided to go mainstream and make it a profession. Looking back I realise that this was actually a much bigger dream than I could have imagined and I had been subconsciously aiming for it for many years. Soon I found myself working my dream role. This happened around 18 months ago and lead to the silence on this site as I went 100% into this dream. I loved it. Every. Single. Moment. I was able to affect real change in the lives of over 1000 young people, I laughed and cried for a good year in that role. Then like many other aims and dreams in my life, it came crashing down. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say, it was taken away from me and for the last year I have been living in limbo, simply trying to make it from one day to another. My passion was gone, my motivation decimated, my world turned upside down with only one solid person who kept me grounded and kept me going through out it all; the wife. This all came to a head on 2nd November 2022. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I was in a dark place, lower than I have ever been. Then something happened (again no boring details) and I managed to pull myself out of the mire that I found myself in. For the last 6 months I have been working a job that I relatively enjoy. The team I work with are lovely and understanding of my back issues (the job is rather physical!). But slowly over time I have begun dreaming again. Dreaming of the final passion that I hold, travel. It is not lost on me that the majority of people who actually read my blog are friends and family. I know that in the near future I will not be whisked away by AA Guides or Lonely Planet to be their new travel writing prodigy, and that is just fine with me. I am still healing, re-building and moving on, and until then, I’ll be here telling you all the random travel rubbish I can. Because I want to, and clearly if you have gotten this far in the post, you want me to too. John.