LIFESTYLE: I Remember.. My Favourite Family Memory
Wednesday, 30 March 2016
A few weeks back, Red Letter Days got in touch and asked me to recall my favourite shared moment with your parents. I had a long hard think but there was one particular holiday, over 15 years ago that kept popping back into my mind. They asked me to write a short paragraph for them to include in their blog post here (link to come asap), but I thought it might be nice to pad it out over here with a bit of a longer post! This post could get VERY long as it was a 5/6 week holiday so I think I'm just going to try to cut it down to specific little things that I remember.
If I tell you that I remember most details about a holiday that I went
on when I was 8, then you've gotta assume that it was a pretty special holiday right? Let me set the scene, it was the summer of 2002, the year after 9/11 and my mum had decided she wasn't going to get on a plane again so my parents had to come up with something a little bit outside of the box for the 5 of us (I have two younger brothers). Basically, we drove to Southampton, got a week long cruise over to NYC, drove to Florida, stayed there for two weeks, and then did the same thing to get back home. It was a pretty incredible holiday and one of my top two ever (only competing with my trip to Thailand.)
Cruises were like nothing we had ever seen before (we've been on one every year since) and this wasn't just another Royal Caribbean cruise, our first trips were were Cunard and they were like the big old ships you see in the films, white gloved afternoon tea, a chocolate on your bed each night, people wore ball gowns to dinner (of course I remember all things food related). When we arrived in America, and my parents took advantage of the three days we had in New York and of course we visited Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty. I also remember being super excited about actually eating chinese from one of those paper pots and the huge ferris wheel inside the giant toys are us.
We spent the next three days driving down to Florida. What do I remember about those days? I remember the big car my dad rented, I remember the hotels we stopped over at on the way and I also remember that there had been a shooting in America that week and
that my mum wouldn't let us go to the outdoor pool in case someone shot
us.
From Florida, I remember the Disney parks but not too well as there were so many of them - I would love to go back to Disney World! I remember going to IHOP for pancakes and all of the delicious crab and lobster shacks around. I remember my brother getting stung by a hornet while we were playing in the pool and I remember making a house with my brothers in the huge walk-in wardrobe
at the villa we were staying in - seriously, look how american it looks!
Two weeks later, it was the same back to NYC and back on the cruise! I remember how we were all super excited (my parents included) when we had the same room attendant on the cruise coming back, we all loved Arnold.
Sorry for all the super blurry
family snaps but I just couldn't help myself when my dad found the old
album in the garage.
I hope you enjoyed my little trip down memory lane, Check out the other bloggers stories over on the RLD blog!