On slowing down, finding adventure in familiar places, and learning that a little more joy doesn’t always require a plane ticket.

I know – it’s a weird time to be reflecting on the year of travel that was 2025. We returned home 10 months and have fully unpacked and lived many adventures since returning.

But, I think it’s taken me this long to really get what the year away meant for us. Before we left, it was like a carrot at the end of the stick. During the year, it was this amazing adventure with excitement around every corner. And when we first got home, it felt like the year that filled us up and drained us all at the same time. All of these things things are true, but there is definitely more to it.

Over the past 10 months, we’ve had the opportunity to notice what has followed us home. Because, though we treasure the memories and photos so dearly, the real treasure we returned home with is a different perspective on how we want to live.

Note: If you want to see our incredibly detailed Grown Up Gap Year magazine with all the travel stories and thoughts, we’d be delighted to share. The digital version formatting can be a little wonky though!

The trip that was years in the making

Our Grown Up Gap Year was something that was in the works for…well for more years than we even realised.

I know our first attempt was meant to be 2020, when we planned to move to the Northern Territory for several months before taking off on our grand adventure.

And, as you might have guessed, COVID through those plans for a loop.

It ended up being a little blessing in disguise being stranded in Australia’s NT for nearly two years. Without any COVID restrictions (except for closed borders) we were free to explore all that the NT had to offer – with the notable absence of other tourists. It wasn’t the adventure we’d planned, but it was an adventure nonetheless.

We postponed our Grown Up Gap Year to 2025, when James would recieve his fellowship. The next few years felt busier and busier with work and new ventures and our engagement and our destination wedding and slowly making our new home in Balnarring Beach. It was an amazing period of life, but there wasn’t much time to slow down and hardly any time to simply be.

So when 2025 rolled around, and through every hurdle the timing offered, we were ready for our big adventure.

Learning to do a little less

With a whole world at our feet and a whole calendar of space to fill, we were chomping at the bit. So many places to do and things to see. But after such a busy period of life, we knew our goal was to take the year slow. Experience places, not simply see them. Wander off the track. Take the long way around.

It was not easy. Do you know how many places exist in the world?! Our bucket list only kept growing, it never once shrank. But we made space. Space for slow mornings and boring towns, and most importantly – space to ask ourselves what we actually wanted our days to look like (and sometimes that was deep-couch-rot kind of rest).

We noticed how hard it was to slow down. And then how good it was to slow down. And then those really busy travel days reminded us how important it was to slow down, and those really slow mornings had us thinking about what it would mean to build a life that didn’t constantly require recovering from.

A life where adventure didn’t always have to be squeezed into annual leave. Where a perfectly good afternoon didn’t need to become a productive one. Where we could be properly bored sometimes.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

And yet, for two people who are quite good at filling a calendar, it was a surprisingly important lesson.

The adventures waiting at home

When we first returned, we had grand plans. I think we had another…dozen countries we planned to visit in 2026?

Like I said, the bucket list only grew.

But coming home brought a few things into focus. For starters, Pretzel and Arnold. We missed those little guys so much.

And while we were away having the time of our lives, a whole year had passed for them, too. Coming home, it was impossible not to notice how much they’d aged.

And so, instead of immediately planning our next escape, we’ve been trying to bring a little more adventure into the life we already have.

We’ve got our paddleboards and plenty of coastline to explore. We’re working towards our divemaster qualifications in the freezing waters of the Mornington Peninsula (a rather different experience from the tropical diving we’d grown accustomed to!). We’re trying new things, visiting new places and finding opportunities to be curious about our own backyard.

And perhaps even more importantly, we’re learning that we don’t need to turn every free weekend into a great big adventure.

Which brings me to the part we’re still working on…

The coffee-on-the-deck philosophy

Ten months back in the real world, and we’ve discovered something rather unsurprising.

It’s very easy to get busy again.

The to-do lists grow, work picks up, we say yes to thing, we make plans for every available weekend, and before we know it, we’re looking at the calendar wondering where all our free time has gone.

Every so often, one of us has to remind the other: Wasn’t this exactly what we wanted to change?

Because the point of taking a year away wasn’t to have one beautiful, slow chapter before returning to a life of perpetual busyness.

It was to learn how to make room for the things that matter, wherever we happen to be.

So we’re practicing – daily. We’re constantly reminding ourselves how good (read: vital) it is to move through this world slowly.

And how do we remind ourselves of this? Well, we love a coffee on the deck.

Last year, that might have meant sitting on the deck of a boat somewhere beautiful with nowhere else we needed to be.

These days, it’s more likely to mean sitting on our own back deck in Balnarring Beach, with Pretzel and Arnold at our feet and a long list of things we could probably be doing instead.

And you know what? The coffee tastes just as good. Maybe even better. (If I make it, James makes a terrible coffee).

We’re certainly not experts at this whole slowing-down thing. We still get caught up in the excitement of new projects and adventures. We still overcommit, overplan and occasionally forget the very lessons we spent a year learning.

But we are getting better at noticing. Better at recognising when life is becoming too full. Better at making room for an unplanned afternoon. Better at remembering that rest, play and adventure don’t need to be earned by ticking everything off a to-do list.

I think that’s why it’s taken me ten months to write this. When we first got home, I could have told you all about the incredible places we’d been and the things we’d experienced. But the real magic of that year has revealed itself slowly, in the ordinary days since.