I don’t know about you, but at the moment I am surrounded by people who are headlong into their New Year’s resolutions. This means my office is filled with people eating salads, discussing sugar-free diets and actually going for runs during their lunch break. Now I love a good resolution as much as the next person, but one thing I’ve always wondered is why so many of them sound like such hard work*. Personally I prefer to set myself challenges and, rather than deny myself something, I like to tick things off a list – which explains why I thought #30b430 was such a good idea in 2011. (*FYI In no way am I trying to take away from all of the people who do this. In fact, I tip my hat to them all – it’s just that I have zero willpower and sugar is my friend.)

Finally completing my #30b430 list at the London Olympics

And this year my goal is easier than ever: to travel more. As I said in my first post of 2016, so much of 2015 got taken up by wedding planning that I felt like we missed out on doing our favourite thing. Whimsical thoughts of romantic weekends in Europe were immediately quashed by the pressing issue of cutting out 100 place names; while spontaneous visits to see friends were put on the back burner due to important decisions like what colour chair covers we should have (can you tell I’m not missing the planning?)

So this year we decided to make a concerted effort to travel more and, inspired by Lucy from On the Luce, we have made it our New Year’s resolution to do the ‘Take 12 Trips’ challenge. This means that once a month we will go on an adventure somewhere. It may not be far and it’s most likely to just be for a weekend (due to the fact that I am using up most of my annual holiday allowance on our honeymoon to Japan) but I’m super excited that it will hopefully get us out of our travel rut and add a few more exciting destinations to our wish-list.

On a long car journey on Boxing Day from my parents’ home in Scarborough to Mr A’s family home in Croydon we whiled away the time by making a list of all of the cities in Europe we’d like to visit. Turns out there’s quite a few!

We’re kicking things off with a visit to Ireland this month and I’m slightly embarrassed to say that it will be my first ever visit to the country. So if anyone has any tips for Belfast please send them my way!

Other trips we’ve got in the diary are our honeymoon in May, of course, and a weekend to Centre Parcs in Norfolk with friends in July. We’ve also got our list of European destinations ready to go and are regularly checking Skyscanner to scoop up any cheap deals.

Hopefully this will be one resolution I’ll be able to keep!

Adventures await!

What are your New Year’s resolutions? And where would you recommend for a weekend break?