The Random Facts About Me

• Rebecca’s a freelance travel journalist and regularly writes for the Telegraph, the Independent and easyJet Traveller. After graduating from City University’s post grad magazine journalism course, she landed a job as staff writer on the Daily Mail Ski & Snowboard magazine – where she got to write, and ski, for a living, and hasn’t looked back. Combining a love of adventure with a nose for a good story, she’s written features on mountain-top yoga in Verbier, women’s snowboard camps in the French Alps and cycling and spas in the Scottish Borders. Now with a young daughter in tow, family travel is her focus – to inspire the next generation to explore the world and see what’s round the corner.
• We’re an adventurous family – my husband is a scientist and recently returned from surveying the seas around the world’s most remote permanently inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic; my sister is a pilot with British Airways; my brother is an action sports photographer; and I’m a travel journalist. So between us, we get about.
• Before having a child I enjoyed cycling up mountains. Now, I prefer to cycle around them, preferably alongside rivers and lakes – always following the contours, not crossing them!
• I don’t tan particularly well but god I love a beach. My favourite is a cove on an uninhabited island in the Maddalena archipelago off the north east coast of Sardinia. It took us 45 minutes to walk down to, and we weren’t entirely sure what we’d find when we got there, but we followed our noses and came across the most perfect white sand, rocky outcrops and clear blue sea – which we had to ourselves for the day. Our picnic lunch of cold meats, fresh tomatoes and little bottles of ready-mixed Aperol Spritz topped it off perfectly.
• Japan is top of my bucket list – the food, the skiing, the culture, I want it all! Closely followed by Sri Lanka. Going to wait until our daughter is a little bit older, but am already planning dream itineraries and must-sees.
• I’ve had some interesting sauna and spa experiences through work (an Austrian spa with colleagues wearing nothing but modesty towels brought out the blushes, to say the least), but the best one was in northern Finland, where saunas are revered. The sauna was a large, wood-fired hut filled with the scent of birch branches – which we were encouraged to waft against our limbs. Once we’d reached peak heat, it was outside for a sprint across the snow – wrapped only in a towel – to a hole cut in the thick ice of the neighbouring lake and a plunge into the bracing water. It was the most invigorating experience, and highly addictive – I ended up doing five laps of sauna and icy plunge, before retiring to another hut for a dinner of Loimulohi, salmon smoked on a wooden plank, and vodka.
• Travelling with a child has its moments but we try to do it as much as possible so it’s just part of normal life. A variety of sticker books, snacks and stories work for us most of the time, but I’m also a fan of just encouraging her to look out the window and watch the world go by.
• Worst travel experience? Arriving at Chicago airport for a connecting flight to Denver for a Colorado ski feature and having a stomach bug as we came into land. Trying to hold it together through US Customs was terrifying – they very nearly put me back on the plane as they didn’t want me bringing in diseases! I had to spend 24 hours in Chicago airport recovering – felt like I was in my own hellish version of Tom Hanks’ film Terminal.
• Family holidays have always been really important – I remember dad would eek out every last hour of his holiday allowance so we could pack in as much as possible, making sure bank holidays were used to the max, travelling overnight, that sort of thing. He travelled for work so whenever possible we’d join him for a holiday – we were really lucky as it meant we got to visit such places as South Africa, California and Australia (relatively) reasonably.
• Also on the bucket list is to spend a winter in the Alps as a family – enroll our daughter in the local school, get totally immersed in the mountain life and ski everyday. It’ll need some planning but we’ll do it – I’ve had the skiing bug since little and some of my happiest memories are from working two ski seasons in the French Alps.
• Backpacking around the world after uni was mainly fantastic fun with one of my best friends. We came unstuck though when we landed in Pape’ete on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. It wasn’t our first choice of destination but was the only option that worked with the flights we needed home from New Zealand. Despite its beauty (lagoons, palm-fringed beaches, laid-back islands), it wasn’t our first choice because it’s notoriously expensive. And coming at the end our trip meant our budget was tight. This was made worse by arriving late on a Saturday night with just $10 between us. The banks didn’t open on Sundays, of course, our credit cards didn’t work in the ATMs, and everyone had recommended spending as little time as possible in Pape’ete, escaping to one of the islands – Moorea in our case – as soon as possible. But with no cash we couldn’t eat or buy ferry tickets, so we spent a pretty miserable day in hot, dirty, central Pape’ete stretching out a large bottle of water from a café between us for much of it. Thankfully our hostel accepted cards, and the following day we got a ferry out to a beach hut in Moorea. Trouble in paradise, eh?