I had a cute idea I was going to send myself postcards with notes for these two weeks, but guess what? I didn't.
Holiday overview
This was a big old departure from our usual holidays. Not only were we outside the UK, we were traveling around by train ("inter-railing"), and how many countries were we in? four if you include brief stops in Germany.
It was good. Although I'm still somewhat passive when it comes to planning the movement and daily activities and whatnot, the distribution of labour was less unfair than when C is jockeying us all along and driving us around. I get to destroy my back carrying a ton of stuff from locaton to location and do most of the cooking too, so I feel like more of an active contributor.
The kids were pretty great overall, considering some of the epic journeys we undertook … getting from the Swiss to Belgian sites was more or less 12 hours of travelling (!)
I kept a physical journal of the whole trip, which I kept updated each day with diary entries, comics and scrapbooked ephemera. You'll need to read that if you want all the details 😜
Highlights
There was so much good stuff going on, this is just a random selection of things off the top of my head:
- great accomodation, for the most part
- time to read
- time to write and draw
- obliging weather: sun for lake swimming, cloud for city trips
- Musee D'Orsay with the kids
- St Beatus's cave
- Reichenbach Falls with neighbours
- Ghent
- comic jams with the kids
- K jumping off the high diving platforms
Lowlights
I have a general policy of only journalling positive stuff, but I'm including this by way of flagging the ratio of good to bad, and because it's interesting in itself…
We went up the Jungfrau in a cable car and decided to walk down it. This was a mistake. It was hella steep and my legs were weak and shaking by the time I was halfway. Scree, mud, wet rocks, tree roots — it doesn't let up the whole way down.
I was pretty convinced, as I was in amongst it, that this was the worst part of the whole trip, and that was comforting in a way. The punchline was when I discovered a day or so later that we'd descended from the same height as Ben Nevis (the highest peak in the British Isles).
Keto pause
Before going on holiday I had some feeble notion of sticking to my ketosis diet, but that went out the window on day one, pretty much.
So I've been well off keto for the last two weeks, stuffing myself with copious amounts of bread, chocolate and alcohol of all kinds. Zero fasting, no lemon water or apple cider vinegar… I weighed in at 13.5 stone before the holiday and I was hoping not to gain more than half a stone.
I just checked after arriving back yesterday and I'm 14st on the nose, so that worked out perfect.
I've stocked up with a bunch of low-carb meal ingredients and I'm going back on the regime as of today.
END