Tale's Travel Recap 2023 + A Few Tips

TALE'S TRAVEL RECAP 2023 + A FEW TIPS

At the time of posting, it's the final day of 2023 which caps off the busiest year I've ever had in terms of international travel, something that is quite visibly a big passion of mine nowadays, but quite often it does raise the question of "how is Tale able to do this?" Well with some time to pass, I thought it'd be fun to recap my 2023 adventures and contextualise how it can be balanced with work and life in general. I originally wrote this on the flight back from Spain but decided not to post it because it felt too accidentally "braggy", but a few people read through it privately and encouraged me to post it anyway so here we go!

CIRCUMSTANCES

Now I won't try and lie to you and say that just anyone can pack their bags and do five holidays in a year, everybody's circumstances are different and, no denial, mine are pretty ideal for gallivanting about the way I have done, but if I break it down I think it starts to make sense and some of it might be applicable to travels of your own. Barring any of the uncontrollables like family, health etc, the two main factors are money (how much you earn per year) and working life (how much time away from work/studies you can take per year)

The money part isn't very interesting to explain so I won't dwell on it, all that's really important to know in my case is that I have a comfortable job which means I can stay in the green as long as I'm relatively sensible and my holidays are kept to a reasonable budget. I'm not a private person at all about my income and whenever someone asks me, I'll usually give them the answer, I just ended up leaving it off this write-up because I don't want to set the impression of "if I don't earn at least this much then I can't do any travelling". But I don't have a rich family and my job is a weird hybrid of marketing and IT which means that for a 27-year old I'm probably earning more than the average marketing guy my age and much less than a full IT guy (which I'll take, considering my degree is in Marketing and falling into a job that was looking for CompSci graduates feels almost accidental). I do have to be somewhat strict with my costs on flights, accommodation and spending while I'm away, but when I go into detail on each trip I think they'll explain themselves.

I think the working circumstances is the more unique part, and the one where even if you're not in my type of working lifestyle, there's probably a few things you can try. Obviously, I know plenty of people in jobs like teaching and healthcare where your time off genuinely isn't that controllable, so stuff like that really can just be a non-starter. But for those with a typical "certain amount of days off per year" role, I really encourage people to make the most of it and use everything they've got. My job provides 25 days off per year + bank holidays, which I think is pretty much the industry standard these days, though I've certainly had jobs offering a lot less previously. I'm also Monday-Friday nine-to-five, so thankfully I can always count on having weekends - I've been there before with public service work that can fall into weekends and please god never again!! Essentially though, if I get 30ish days off per year including bank holidays, you bet I'm using them ALL
My biggest perk though, is that I work fully remotely. Jobs like these aren't too easy to come by, and I would say I mainly took advantage of the Covid period to move my way into one (having been needlessly office based throughout 2020), but I've always known I wanted a fully work-from-home job if possible, and I made it my life's mission to get one until I thankfully succeeded. But because of this, I can worry a little bit less about my total days off because if necessary and the timezones align enough, I CAN take the work laptop with me abroad - it's just obviously to be avoided where possible, especially if you have a remote work in data security, government work etc where you likely need to be within your own country. Rather, the big benefit here is to cut down on any time off that you'd otherwise need to take within the UK (or your own home country) instead. Across the entire year, the amount of days I booked off work while in my own country, was two. The first for going to the filming of Eurovision in Liverpool, the second to spend my birthday in Alton Towers, which I was later able to reclassify as a "working" day as long as I met some colleagues in the office for an hour (I work for the company that owns the theme park). Other than that, I didn't take a single day off this year where I wasn't abroad.

It might sound then like I don't give myself any time to relax, or I just completely swerve doing any kind of social stuff back home, but that's not the case - I'm just very willing to work on the move. 2-day UK Smash tournaments like Regen and Manchester Grand Conquest where you ideally need to travel on Friday and Monday? The laptop was there with me. The surrounding days of my Eurovision show in Liverpool? Was working in a Maccies in the city centre. Trips to see my mates like Alex and Tom? Guess what's in the bag. And even the days where I AM going abroad and not planning to work, I'll still try to do my shift at home before then getting an evening flight, or book a cheap hotel/stay with mates in the area of the airport the night before, just to ensure that none of my actual days off are spent in England itself. At the end of the day, I very much do still work a full time job for 11 months a year, I'm just very liberal about WHERE I work it, and I'm so glad to have the opportunity when in previous office-based roles I really would have been frittering away days just getting to and from stuff in the UK, let alone further away. If your line of work lends itself to remote work, I really couldn't recommend it more highly, but even if it doesn't, I still think being smart about doing your commutes on the same day as a shift where possible really helps out.

But with that bit of background done, onto the actual recap of everywhere I went this year!

SWEDEN 🇸🇪  (Stockholm, March)

The first trip of the year was a fairly impromptu one, as I'd wound up with three extra days off work that I'd carried over from the year before that needed to be used before the end of March, but it has really enlightened me on the magic of a winter holiday to kick the year off. If you're from a cold country like the UK anyway, might as well go colder and trudge through some snow, right? But the city was truly stunning. I tied it around Melodifestivalen, the Swedish national qualifier for Eurovision, the moment I heard that the GOAT Loreen would be competing. It seems a bit silly now considering she got through to Eurovision anyway and then WON, but at the time of booking we didn't know what her song would sound like and she had lost in the Melfest heats before (even after her first Eurovision win) so I didn't want to take any chances!! Costs-wise, flights were about £130 and then accommodation in Stockholm goes crazy so I settled for an airbnb where the host stays in the flat with you, never my preference but it cut those costs down to £150ish and kept the whole trip under 350 including gig tickets. The Smash scene were also lovely when I visited them for a weekly!

AUSTRALIA 🇦🇺  (Melbourne, May)

Well in most of these trip write-ups I'll be hoping to demonstrate how affordable most of them were, but for Australia, I absolutely cannot. The flights alone cost a grand. And of course they take 22 hours. This was always going to be "the big holiday" of the year, and to be able to afford it, Sweden aside, I pretty much needed to go nowhere between this date and September the year before (this was how I ended up with 3 days to carry over in the first place), but this trip was absolutely essential to do, because it was for a good friend's wedding! I got to go with my robots friend Nick and join our Australia buddy Luke at his big day, and bless him, to make sure we could manage it costs-wise we even stayed in his house and bridal bnb for most of the days surrounding his own wedding. We'd both met him before when he visited the UK, but this was our chance to see him on home turf and do a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Every time the wedding guests asked us how long we were staying in Australia, we'd say a week, which just left them flabbergasted every time and they kept telling us we should've stayed longer, but I've got no regrets honestly as we achieved a loooot in that week and we could hardly stay with the happy couple during their honeymoon! But after doing the fantastic wedding, a trip down the Great Ocean Road to a rainforest treetop walk, a caravan by the beach and a city day in Melbourne where we went back out in the wedding tuxedos just to look like posh twats at the football game and in the shops (ty to Matt at the wedding for unpromptedly buying us the footie tickets to begin with??), this was fantastic and well worth the saving up and the endless flying.

ITALY 🇮🇹  (Bologna, Rimini and Florence, June)

Italy was the first of two trips that I'd tied around Smash Bros this year, I was certainly hoping to slot in a USA or France trip for Smash as well, but it never quite worked out. I went to Bologna for ICARUS though and I'm very glad I did! I've never ever been to Italy and I knew it was bound to happen at some point, might as well take the Smash tournament route, particularly as I wouldn't want this to be my only Italy trip. I did an east-focused trip including daytrips to Florence and Rimini whilst staying in Bologna, but I've also deliberately left the likes of Rome and Naples for a future trip (I'll get that Vatican flag next time). For this I stayed with some familiar faces from UK Smash including Will, Mitch, Steve and Apollo, all of whom I'd never really gotten to know outside of a Smash setting and they made for great people to share the experience with, and particular mention to IronDan who I had never met prior to the trip whatsoever and as my roomie, he ended up as a fantastic mate by the end of it all. But Italy wasn't even the whole story, because as part of the trip...

SAN MARINO 🇸🇲  (San Marino, June)

...I also got to throw in San Marino as a bonus country! Now I have to admit, silly as it sounds, travel-wise this was the one that always grabbed me more from the off. The fact that San Marino even is still an independent country in its own right astounds me, carried in many ways by their reputation as the world's worst-ranked football team, but as someone who had never been to a microstate before, I just had to see it for myself and see if there was anything worth seeing in a country that is mostly just the butt of the joke... but it was beautiful??? I got there via bus from Rimini for a grand total of 6 Euros and spent the night there, walking up all of its unbelievably treacherous and unguarded cliffsides to reach each of its three towers. You soak in some truly sensational views but you also feel the ever-nearing call of death as you're one false step away from falling off a mountain, but it was sincerely very very good. Biggest surprise of the year, and I recommend it 100% unironically if you're already in Eastern Italy (just get a train to Rimini and spare 6 euros for the bus, job done). That said though, whilst I went here by myself, everyone else from my airbnb went to Venice instead which was, probably more sensible,,,

IRELAND 🇮🇪  (Dublin, October)

It's maybe a little tenuous to put this in the same list as full-on holidays when this was only a 4-day trip to Dublin which I'd already been to three times beforehand, and I didn't even book this off work - I just worked from the airbnb on the Friday and Monday, only getting the weekend fully spare and I had no real free movement of my own because we were a big group in a remote spot. Needless to say if not for my remote work, this trip wouldn't have happened. But my housemates are fighting robot builders just like myself (they're the brains of the operation) and had decided they were going to the Irish Robotics Championship, so it was either go with them or sit around at home! Unfortunately the nature of having to transport a large fighting robot overseas by ferry and costs of accommodating a group of eight in Dublin means that this might genuinely have been the second most expensive trip of the year behind only Australia, but at least we won some back when we won the event!! There's really no way to put it humbly, I won the featherweight championship by myself and then was immediately a part of the winning heavyweight team too (even if I didn't exactly do much), so mission accomplished there! Saw that IronDan fella again at the Smash weekly too...

COSTA RICA 🇨🇷  (San Jose and Puerto Viejo, November)

The second and final trip of the year that I tied around Smash Bros was Costa Rica, but do not get it twisted - I've wanted to visit this country for over nine years, and it was very much a case of using my reach in Smash to get that opportunity. I'd been fascinated with the country ever since their famous World Cup run in 2014 (Navas the GOAT) and I'd always thought of Costa Rica as an Australia-style "trip of the year" that would happen one day but needed a great deal of planning. But would you believe, I booked my flight from London six weeks before going out there, and it only cost £504?? I was shocked. And because the nature of the Smash event meant I could stay with the players and in the venue, I didn't pay a penny towards accommodation the whole time I was there, other than my one night in the beach town for a grand total of 22 quid. What I'd thought was far out of reach was genuinely so doable, and that's all thanks to the kind people of Central America's Smash scene for welcoming me with open arms, before even mentioning the good times with the top players who travelled in from afar like Mr E and Tarik. Big thanks in particular to MtKat, The Doctor and g.rar for housing and food, and to everyone I befriended at CUMBRE (in particular I'll never forget the late night chats with Bhio). But then I got to stand on top of a volcano?? And meet an Inazuma friend in Paz for a city tour? And get drunk by the sensational beaches on my final full night? This was everything I ever wanted and I never thought it would happen this year.

SPAIN 🇪🇸  (Valencia, Alicante and Benidorm, November)

Trips to Spain are a funny one for me, because growing up this was the ONLY country my mum would ever take me to, to the point where I got completely sick of it, but visiting as an adult truly hits different. Unlike the trips above (bar Dublin), I did not go to a single new place the whole time I was in Spain, but such is the nature of a trip with your mum and stepdad. If my mum ever offers to take me to an island like Gran Canaria or Tenerife then I always flat refuse, but when she chooses Benidorm, that's when I leap in and say "go on then" because not only do I get to spend a few days in the sun with mum, I can also disappear off to Valencia for half the trip, which might just be my favourite city in the whole world and also where I can meet up with one of my best friends in Carla to show me around and hang out. Even if most of the time is spent watching anime as a duo and going in every anime shop to buy Inazuma Eleven manga (you never expect Spain to be such an anime haven until you get there), this is by far the most "normal" holiday I ever do, but for the even split of family and friends with a bit of sun on my face, it's always worth it!

And that's all of them, at least not including extended UK stays like Eurovision week and brief stays in Scotland, but I think it's obvious I'll have a hard time ever topping my travels of 2023, especially as I may never have those extra three days off work to carry over again, but we'll just have to see what comes next! I'm attending Smashborg in Sarpsborg, Norway in early Jan, so that sounds like the right starting point. But here's to more adventures, and if any of you are looking into doing some unexpected travels of your own next year, I'm always around to offer some advice!

Tale