In December last year I became the proud owner of my first (ever) passport stamp. Feeling pretty late to the party here but I’ve not got too much of a history of long haul flights. Travel has always been something that I’ve wanted to experience, and after graduating university it become something that my boyfriend Lee and I wanted to delve into. One day last year we decided to write down where we wanted to travel and wrote the locations on bright green post it notes that we stuck to the wall above our bed. They don’t look the best (not sure why they’re so green) but they are still happily stuck as I’m writing this. I am so glad that we came up with this because it did force a reality check, looking at the 20 plus notes messily clinging to the wall (and that barely covered the ‘must do’s’); we had the wakeup call of trying to plan the when’s and how’s. We calculated that if we successfully ticked two trips of the list a year we’d be well into our forties before we cleared the wall. I don’t know about Lee but I had envisioned being care free and in my twenties skipping around with a coconut during all of these trips… Of course, there can always be coconuts but the point is we needed to start. We decided to begin with three weeks in Thailand over New Year’s. We wanted to do something different to celebrate the New Year and we managed to stretch out our work holiday thanks to Christmas, allowing us to take three weeks exploring the mainland and islands. So come the 27^th we were taking down the tree and heading to Bangkok in search of coconuts…