Embracing Europe

Em-brace-ing (verb): accept (a belief, theory, or change) willingly and enthusiastically.

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As some of you know, I recently started a 6-month European adventure with my partner. We are the physical embodiment of the ‘big quit’, the ‘great resignation’ or, as I like to call it the ‘if not now, then when’ movements. After a lifetime of choosing the sensible route - in his case school, uni, job, post-graduate degree and more job. In my case; Olympics, Olympics, Olympics, Olympics – and after two years of pandemic-induced stagnation, we seemingly conned each other into a trip of a lifetime.

Travel has always been one of our pipe-dreams – that ‘thing’ you talk about with misty, far-away eyes while snuggling in bed on a particularly wet and wild day; a shaft of daydreaming to pierce the gloom. However, slowly but surely the conversation solidified from the undefined, sludgy realm of ‘should’ and ‘one day’ to the firmer vernacular of ‘could’ and ‘maybe’. Eventually it emerged, fully formed like David appearing out of Michelangelo’s marble slab, into ‘there are cheap flights to Athens, let's book them’ and neither of us dissented.

Basically, this adventure is the love child of an over-active imagination and an inability (at least on my part) to say ‘no’.

We landed in Athens on April 7th 2022. The following blog posts will document this accidental adventure and hopefully inspire others to take a leap into their daydream.