It’s one of the big decisions that international teachers have to face each year: where to go for the summer.

If, like me, your partner is a teaching partner, that’s at least one of the decisions made as you will probably go together. But what if, also like me, you and your partner come from different countries? Visiting family and friends at ‘home’ then becomes problematic – particularly if you don’t really have a home any more because you have been overseas for so long. With an aging mother, I feel I should visit as much as I can – which is not hard as my mother (who would be horrified at the epithet “an aging mother”) – is fun to be with. But as much as I love her, as does my husband, spending seven weeks with her is not feasible. Visiting my husband’s and my family and friends in Australia would mean spending seven weeks in winter, not summer. We have done that in the past, but prefer to go to Australia for Christmas to enjoy the summer; particularly now we are in a city that is wet and cold in winter.

And we then find ourselves completely spoilt for choice. Yes, I know, first world problems. Possibilities this year included Delhi, Jaipur, and the Golden Triangle, and seeing the Taj Mahal. We then toyed with the idea of northern Australia, in particular the Kimberleys in Western Australia, where neither of us have been, and Darwin. These areas are best visited in the southern hemisphere winter. We chatted, we explored, we got excited. But we didn’t come to a decision.

We have often discussed taking a cruise, something I think everyone should experience once in their life, if possible. I have always fancied taking a Baltic cruise, particularly one which takes in St. Petersburg so that I can tick another thing off the bucket list: a visit to the Hermitage museum. Many of the cruises we looked at, however, were exactly what I don’t want in a cruise: a few hours in port only, and a boat which holds twice the population of the town in which we lived before leaving Australia. Finally we settled on a crossing, not a cruise, and managed to tick something off my husband’s bucket list in the process.

So, on June 14, the day after we flew into the UK from China at the start of our holiday, we embarked Queen Mary 2 to commence our transatlantic crossing from Southampton to New York.

 

 

 

 

And that was just the beginning of the adventure.