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The Beginning of a New Adventure

Six years ago I completed a 'Project 365', writing a post every day for a year, complete with semi-relevant photos. Looking back, the writing rambled, contained an embarrassing number of spelling mistakes and perhaps at times, overshared. While re-reading the posts can cause my skin to crawl, they serve a wonderful purpose: posterity. Not the grand posterity of Samuel Pepys, recording intimate details about 17th century nobility, but personal posterity: reflecting on where I was 'X' amount of years ago and remembering seemingly lost details. Those jumbled words of mine, often misspelled, also sparked an early fascination for writing, as a means of expression and an exploration into my imagination: a day spent walking in the countryside became an adventure and those who I met along the way were complex characters (granted, whose exposition was rather limited). This inspiration, while I wasn't aware at the time, would lead me into a full-time writing career: as a writer for Saga Cruises I research new and wondrous places, trying to bring them to life with whatever words I can put together. From my desk I travel around the world in eight hours: sheltering in the shade of a fever tree in Maputo before strolling through the cobbled, medieval streets of Lubeck. Tomorrow and for the next week however, I will leave my desk and visit two countries to which I have never been - Norway and Denmark. It is for work however the itinerary is filled with plenty of unique experiences: from staying in the Legoland Hotel in Bellund to a tour of the Hunsfos Brewery in Vennesla.


The trip has sparked my desire to begin another blog. I want to document each day as I did when walking the Camino de Santiago in 2011. Afterwards, it is my hope that I can continue semi-regular posts (I recognise that another Project 365 is impractical).

So, where to begin? Well, yesterday I went for a walk along the Deal-Sandown seafront. When the sun is shining and a jacket isn't required people flock to the beaches in their hundreds. Ice-cream drips across clenched knuckles and the uneven shingle is clumsily negotiated. But when the temperature drops, a northerly wind rises and the clouds grow dark, people opt for the warm shelter offered by a pub, bar or restaurant. The scene as I stepped out looked dramatic: thick black clouds were illuminated by a setting sun and the waves were crashing onto the Goodwin Sands - a 10-mile sandbank lying approximately six miles from Deal's shoreline - which offers protection to large vessels and has done for hundreds of years. The light had faded almost entirely and at 800 ISO the photographs were more grainy than I would have liked:



It's now time for bed. I hope to keep this blog updated as my week goes along.

WI

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