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In two weeks time we will be heading off on our long awaited cruise! We originally booked this cruise back in 2019, but due to major surgery for Miss S and Covid thrown in the mix, it’s needed to be moved from one year to the next! This will be our first cruise and although we are trying to stay grounded and not get our hopes TOO high, we are all hoping we will love our first cruise experience and it will be an easier way for us to travel a bit further afield. Having both come from a travel background, Mr S and I, are always itching to get out and explore and the kids love to also…hopefully cruising will help satisfy this desire!  We have spoken to P&O Customer Services a fair amount over the last few years, with varying success! This is our experience... The good bits… P&O have been great moving our booking and spent a lot of time trying to find us an accessible cabin on the various cruises we have looked at over the last few years (but more on accessible cabins below!)  Our c

Mr S and I have always enjoyed going to the theatre and had been keen to try it out as a family for a while.  Having tried a cinema trip for the first time as a family at the start of the summer holidays last year, we felt confident Miss S would manage and be happy during a theatre trip. Miss S has a startle reflex due to her Cerebral Palsy which means her body will jump at sudden or loud noises and this can be uncomfortable for her at times. Going to the cinema, we found that although Miss S does jump at times, she manages it well and always wants to go back. We have lost count of how many films we have now seen at the cinema! Our first planned trip to try out the theatre was to see a pantomime last Christmas at the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton.  With Covid restrictions still so changeable at the time, we were SO relieved and excited that the Cinderella pantomime could still go ahead as planned!  We loved the pantomime and everyone else we spoke to who had also been to see it, felt

  Six months have passed since our blog post ( 'Travelling accessibly in a Covid world...' ) speculating on what travelling might look like in these Covid times. I feel an update is in order, as like everyone else, we adapt to this new normal.  We have kept a close eye on what P&O cruises are up to, as we had our first family cruise booked with them for Summer 2021. Currently, as it stands today, P&O have paused all their cruises in to April 2021. Whether their summer cruises do go ahead next year, no one knows quite yet!  We have been impressed by what P&O plan to have in place once they can sail again. From requesting all passengers have health screenings and Covid tests prior to travelling, rigorous cleaning regimes, enhanced ventilation systems and so on. You can read all about the measures P&O will be putting in place here . That said, with the Covid measures in place, a cruise any time soon would be a different experience to what we were hoping for, especi

During a lazy Sunday breakfast Mrs S proudly told me she now had 2000 followers of her blog on Twitter.  She then went onto tell me that she thought it would be good to write about how we think we are going to travel in this new COVID world and that it would be good if I (Mr S) wrote it; that will teach me to talk about this sort of stuff over breakfast! Over the period that we have been in lock down, we have continued to dream and plan future trips, but it’s fair to say that as this pandemic has evolved, so has our thinking about where and how we want to travel. We have moved from trying to take our first long haul trip as a family, really trying to put the airlines through their paces to support Miss S and her needs, to accepting the reality that, until a vaccine is developed it is likely we will be travelling in a ‘socially distanced bubble’.   Our initial thoughts are, that as we have our first cruise booked for summer 2021 (and although we are not changing our plans

…or not, as it currently stands! Mr S and I, were lucky enough to escape for a few days at the end of November, just the two of us. We were in need of some time to relax and were dying for a bit of sunshine and warm weather. Mr S had visited Dubai in the past and we had a great trip to Abu Dhabi together, when Master S was little. Having lived out in the Middle East for 18 months, we had always planned to go to Dubai but the trip we had planned as a family of 3, was cancelled last minute due to Miss S’s very premature arrival. Obviously she didn’t want to miss out on the fun! So Dubai has always been a destination high on my list to visit.  We knew Dubai was a fairly long way to travel for just a few nights but we decided to go for it. Surely we’d be able to sleep on the flight when we were child-free?! That part of the plan didn’t quite work out as we’d hoped (bright, noisy cabin on an overnight flight!) but the lazy lie-ins and relaxing on the beach that followed, more t