Hello October! Life Update Since Returning From Travelling

Since returning back to the UK after travelling around South East Asia for the best part of three months, I’ve been pretty MIA on my blog and social media. Rather than sit at home and feel guilty about it (which I’ve been doing for the best part of three months), I thought I’d write a little update as to why this is! We flew back to the UK on August 30th, arriving at Gatwick after the most stressful journey home that ended up taking close to 24 hours. I’m not exaggerating when I say pretty much everything that could’ve gone wrong with our flight did, aside from the actual flying part. I won’t go into that too much now, as I’m definitely going to write a post in the future fully detailing all the disasters!

When we got back, we spent a few days in Cambridge with James’ family before heading back down to Cornwall, where my Mum lives and we’d left all of our belongings from our old flat. It was weird to come home from travelling, but especially weird to not come back to a permanent base. I know that may sound strange seeing as we hadn’t had one in months, but that meant it was exactly what we needed. I remember that first night back in my own bed at my Mum’s house being the best, as I finally felt some stability and familiarity with my surroundings. We were lucky that when we got back we still managed to catch the last of what had been an incredibly hot British summer, so spent time in Cornwall at the beach (we even went surfing!).

I’d loved travelling so much, but the last couple of nights before we left, I was happy to be coming home. I’d had enough of the sticky heat, constantly feeling rubbish (I didn’t get on with the food great) and mosquito bites. I was excited to come home and feel like a normal person again, where I could wear make-up and my hair down without being a sweaty mess, cook my own food and not have to cover myself in deet constantly. I’m not being ungrateful at all – as I said, I loved my time away and wouldn’t change it for anything. It really was the best few months of my life! But we both agreed, for us we’d chosen the perfect amount to be away, so we were ready to come home.

However, one of the things I was most excited to come home to was routine. I love knowing what I’m doing, having a plan, not being all over the place. That’s just me, and I’ve always been the same. It’s always something that’s heavily affected how I feel mentally. However, once back, things actually just seemed to get more hectic. After a few days in Cambridge and a few days in Cornwall, we headed back up to Bristol. We weren’t properly moving into our new flat yet, so only took up essentials, bedding and a couple of suitcases of clothing to last us a month or so. I was so excited to be back in the city. I adore living in Bristol, but for some reason I’d built up an anxiety in my head moving back, which had made me feel sick at the thought of it. I felt so nervous to return, despite living here for the past five years. I think this was due to the fact that I didn’t know what I was really moving back to, having no full plan for my life and having been so used to it just being me and James for the past few months. All these worries left as soon as we drove into Bristol, passing the infamous Clifton suspension bridge, a reminder of the love I have for Bristol.

We were only in Bristol for two nights, as we were lucky enough to be going on a family holiday with James’ Dad to New York . We’d booked this before we booked travelling, we’re not just crazy people who felt we’d needed another holiday at that point! We drove back to Cambridge, where we stayed overnight before flying out to NYC for five days. We had the most incredible time (which you will definitely be reading about in the near future).

When we got back to Bristol afterwards, I felt like I really needed to get myself back on track. I hadn’t posted a blog post since the 2nd of September, despite telling myself I’d be posting regularly. Whilst travelling I actually had more time to sit down each night and write, and it was so much easier when it was fresh in my mind. However since being back, I’ve been really struggling to find the motivation to trawl through thousands of photos, edit them, write my bullet pointed notes into full sentences and publish the posts. It’s so crazy as writing this now is so easy for me, yet going through and finishing those posts has become somewhat more of a chore – something I NEVER wanted my blog to be!

I started my blog because I enjoy writing about my travels and experiences, and wanted to share these with people. I never wanted it to feel like homework! So I’ve decided to give my ‘The Travel Diaries’ posts a little break for now. I’ll definitely finish them all at some point, but I don’t know when that will be. I’m hoping it won’t be too far into the future, and there are still a lot of them to go! But I want to press pause on them and actually enjoy writing again, and get back my motivation. Since being back in Bristol, James and I have also launched a new company and been super busy with that. That, added to moving house, catching up with work and friends I haven’t seen since being away, trying to get to the gym and get my routine back on track, hasn’t left me with much time to blog and therefore I’ve ended up stalling massively. I actually started writing this post last week to publish then, but got poorly with some sort of flu and spent pretty much the whole week in bed not wanting to even look at my laptop. I want to get back to posting regularly, and therefore you may see some different content from me (not the mammoth size posts I usually write). Everyone always says to write within your niche to be a successful blogger, but I’m just gonna write about whatever I want to to get back into writing again and loving it. It’s so weird for me writing this, as I’ve never really written about anything personal on my blog. It’s scary!

So there’s my update (to anyone who cares/was wondering where I’d gone!). Sometimes life gets a little hectic and I felt like I just needed to share with you what’s been going on, as September was a crazy but amazing month! I’d been beating myself up about not blogging, but when I look at what else has been going on I guess it’s understandable that I haven’t had the time. We’re only human!

Charlotte Rick x