In August I spent a splendid week bobbing along the Turkish coast, admiring the views, soaking up the rays, swimming around in turquoise bays and doing very little else to be perfectly honest. I’m not usually a fan of holidays where the sole objective is to get a tan – they strike me as pretty boring. I’d much rather spend my time doing something interesting or fun, and reading a trashy novel by a pool for a week is simply not my idea of fun. It’s just not me. But as the 1-year anniversary of starting to work began to approach, I realised I needed a pause. Since starting my graduate scheme in September 2012, I had only had one proper holiday in an entire year(!) which was my skiing trip to Morzine in March, which was still really active. I have had lots of other work trips abroad and long weekends abroad this year, but I’ve always packed them full of activities, meaning I really felt in need of a week to purely relax.

        The week sailing around Turkey (here’s the full blog post: ‘Sailing and Sauntering Around the Turkish Coast’) was just the ticket – I was out of Wifi signal so the breathtaking sunsets reflected on the calm sea weren’t interrupted by beeps, buzzes and incoming emails.  I helped out with the yacht and put my sailing course last summer to good use, I ate well, swam A LOT, read lots and practically did nothing else. The fact that the scenery and our dinner venue would change each night prevented anyone from getting bored, and I relished the ability to ignore the to-do list and the endless emails I seem to collect. These are two postcards I picked up in Göcek, one of the marinas we stopped at for lunch and to buy supplies in one day. Don’t they just look so tempting? Seeing that still water makes me want to dive in and make ripples. Or go waterskiing – perfect conditions for it.

Do you love “do-nothing” holidays or are you always trying to do and see as much as possible? I’m normally the latter but have discovered that the former is not so bad, every now and again, and especially when you have surroundings as beautiful as these!