Adventure goals for 2023

Happy New Year!! We hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. This was our first time spending New Year's Eve together and we enjoyed watching the fireworks around the village and dancing in my parent's kitchen until 4 in the morning.

Like last year, we wanted to share some of our adventure goals for 2023. But first, we wanted to reflect on how we did relative to the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of 2022...

In July, we spent a night camping in the Netherlands on the island of Texel – our first time camping in the Netherlands despite living here together for five months during the first COVID lockdown. Another one of our goals was to try bikepacking, so we got to tick that off the list too! To read about our trip, check out this blog post.

Although we didn't spend as much time together on the SWCP in 2022 as we did in previous years, we did manage to hike a short section of the path together that we hadn't done previously. On a beautiful sunny day in April, we got the ferry from Plymouth to Mount Batten and hiked to Bovisand Beach for a quick dip in the sea. In total, we hiked around 9 kilometres on the coast path. It felt good to be back!

Some of our wild swimming highlights of the year include swimming in a freezing stream on Dartmoor, in the beautiful waters of Lake Como and in the sea off the south coast of France. We're looking forward to swimming together in Cornwall when Brett comes to visit me later in 2023!

Although we did manage to go hiking in the mountains (in the Austrian Alps), I'm not sure we can technically say we submitted a mountain together, because we took a gondola to the top...The views were worth it.

This goal was half achieved as I managed to go solo camping for the first time, but Brett didn't (he has solo camped in the past though!). I guess I can't blame him – wild camping isn't super easy to do when you're living in Paris!

We spent a heck of a lot of time on trains in 2022 – much of which during our two-week Interrailing trip around Western Europe. For a couple in a long distance relationship, I'm proud of us for finding ways of seeing each other regularly without flying.

We finally had the chance to explore London together this year! We had a great weekend hanging out with good friends in the city. We visited the Natural History Museum, did a long walk along the Regent's Canal and even got to see our first live theatre show together – Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, which was fantastic!

I wrote and published 20 blog posts this year, so I'm going to say the first part of this goal was achieved. The second part...not so much, although it's definitely something I'm still keen to do at some point in the near future. My personal goal for the year was to publish a new blog post every two weeks – and I was doing fairly well until I started my MRes in Cornwall and things got a bit busy. But that's okay. As Brett reminds me, this is something that should be fun, not stressful.

According to the Wix statistics, the blog saw over 400 unique visitors throughout 2022. Our two most popular posts from the year – about our journey on the Transalpin Panorama train and our trip to Menton – each had over 200 views. Thanks again to everyone who reads this blog and follows along on our adventures.

There were, of course, some goals that we failed to achieve in 2022 – to try something new each month and to try something that is exciting and out of our comfort zones (e.g. bungee jumping). But 2023 is a new year, and there's plenty of time to keep working on those goals!

Having reflected on our goals in 2022, we've been brainstorming some new adventure goals for the new year. Here's what we've got so far:

Thanks, as always, for reading. We're looking forward to another year full of adventure together, and we hope you have some adventures in store for you in 2023 ♥