Planning the Holiday – and it is a holiday!

 

After the excitements, or at least in our case the absence of excitements in 2020, we were determined to make the most of our summer in 2021 so began to make plans for this East Anglian holiday in early January 2021.

 

Holiday or Staycation

 

As someone who twice in my career was forced to take a staycation, i.e. a holiday at home, I don’t like the media’s misuse of the term staycation. On my two staycations I visited some pretty places across South and Mid Wales and the West Country but returned each day to home. However nice the trips were, being bound to get back home each night and to start from there each morning made the staycations much more restricted than a holiday like the one for which we are about to depart.

 

Our holidays in Cornwall in 2007, in Yorkshire and Cumbria in 2010 and in Scotland in 2016 were as much holidays as the trips to Europe (2012 & 2014), Asia (2006) and the Americas (2002, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 & 2019). Planned trips away from home with the object of relaxing in a new environment we have not experience before. So, for me this is most definitely a holiday, there will be no mention of staycations on this blog. (Rant over).

 

Details of some of the trips outlined above can be explored in the links to the right of this post (if viewing on a PC or tablet you will need to scroll down if viewing on a smaller mobile device).

 

Why East Anglia

 

As I’ve already mentioned we have travelled on occasion to Scotland, the North of England and the West Country, I lived for six years in the West Midlands so know that area well too. So where were we to go that neither of us knew well but which would be well worth a visit. A quick look at the map of the UK and it became obvious that East Anglia was a big gap in our visits. I’d been to the area on one day for a funeral of a colleagues Dad, but otherwise it is completely unexplored by us.

 

Other influences on my decision, no surprise to people who have read my previous blogs, have been novels I’ve read. Having really enjoyed the Bernard Cornwall Saxon/Viking Novels (yes, I’ve read all 13) I’d learnt a lot about the East Anglian coastline and the role of the kingdom as one of the first Danish parts of England to convert to Christianity. Over the last four years I’ve also read the series of Shardlake books the last of these, Tombland, is named for the Tombland district of Norwich and depicts that City in the great revolt, known as Kett's Rebellion, in 1549. It will be interesting to see how the history matches against the novels – my experience of both Cornwall and Sansom is that they both take care to align their stories to the history, so we shall see.

 

Imminent planning

 

Last January I spent three or four days with Google and ideas of what we might do on the trip and identified some of the places I really wanted to visit. This led me to go back to a provider we had used in the past - Cottages.com - they had a wide range of properties in the area, so it took quite a while to come to the final choice - Wagtail Barn in Yaxham. This will be our base, but as usual we will be treating ourselves to some lovely food - more details in future posts.