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Holiday choices, for me, always start with a checklist that runs whether I invite it or not. Will it be too hot? How many people will be around? Will there be crowds? How much uncertainty will be involved — and can I book enough ahead of time to have a timetable to hold onto?
I am English-born, heat-intolerant, and living in subtropical Queensland. I have always craved travel. And for most of my adult life, farm life gave me a quiet, blameless reason not to go. In forty years we have had perhaps seven actual holidays. The farm, and something I previously couldn't name, kept me close to home.
In recent years that has slowly changed. I use a travel agent now to handle flights and accommodation — not as a luxury, but as a strategy. My AuDHD doesn't live happily in the planning. It lives in the end result — in being somewhere extraordinary, fully present, with no logistics left to manage. The planning itself needs to belong to someone else, at least the framework of it. I need to know where I will be and when, well in advance, before anything close to excitement can settle in. Once that structure exists, I can begin to look forward to it. I leave space within it for our own experiences, our own rhythm — but the bones need to be there first.
New Zealand in autumn ticked everything: cold air, spectacular scenery for my camera, snow on the mountains for Livio — something he'd carried on his bucket list for years. For farmers, the travel window depends as much on rainfall as on the calendar — if it hasn't rained enough, the irrigation doesn't stop, and neither do we. The harvest wasn't yet upon us, the rain hadn't been kind, but we stopped irrigation anyway, and the window was open.
For me, wanting to go at all is rarely simple. Before the excitement gets a chance to settle, something else tends to arrive alongside it — a quiet guilt at wanting something other than what I already have. "Why isn't this enough?" And underneath that, the practical weight of it: money spent on a holiday is money not going back into the farm. I have over the years developed a belief that travel is a luxury. It's not a belief I grew up with, but these thoughts have stopped me in the past. More times than I can count, probably. They didn't stop me (or us) this time — but they were part of the original wanting, whether I invited them in or not. Once we are actually there — once the cold air hits and the camera is in my hand — most of it falls away. Most of it.
I am English-born, heat-intolerant, and living in subtropical Queensland. I have always craved travel. And for most of my adult life, farm life gave me a quiet, blameless reason not to go. In forty years we have had perhaps seven actual holidays. The farm, and something I previously couldn't name, kept me close to home.
In recent years that has slowly changed. I use a travel agent now to handle flights and accommodation — not as a luxury, but as a strategy. My AuDHD doesn't live happily in the planning. It lives in the end result — in being somewhere extraordinary, fully present, with no logistics left to manage. The planning itself needs to belong to someone else, at least the framework of it. I need to know where I will be and when, well in advance, before anything close to excitement can settle in. Once that structure exists, I can begin to look forward to it. I leave space within it for our own experiences, our own rhythm — but the bones need to be there first.
New Zealand in autumn ticked everything: cold air, spectacular scenery for my camera, snow on the mountains for Livio — something he'd carried on his bucket list for years. For farmers, the travel window depends as much on rainfall as on the calendar — if it hasn't rained enough, the irrigation doesn't stop, and neither do we. The harvest wasn't yet upon us, the rain hadn't been kind, but we stopped irrigation anyway, and the window was open.
For me, wanting to go at all is rarely simple. Before the excitement gets a chance to settle, something else tends to arrive alongside it — a quiet guilt at wanting something other than what I already have. "Why isn't this enough?" And underneath that, the practical weight of it: money spent on a holiday is money not going back into the farm. I have over the years developed a belief that travel is a luxury. It's not a belief I grew up with, but these thoughts have stopped me in the past. More times than I can count, probably. They didn't stop me (or us) this time — but they were part of the original wanting, whether I invited them in or not. Once we are actually there — once the cold air hits and the camera is in my hand — most of it falls away. Most of it.