The Buckhams’ Big Western Adventure

My web page, with its photos and blogs, are mostly dedicated to my very specific birding adventures, but this one has a slightly different angle.

My father celebrated his 80th birthday a few months back and to mark the moment he had booked the entire family on an overseas holiday to Disney World for a week followed by a week on a Caribbean Cruise where we would sail east and make stopovers on a few island destinations (can’t thank you enough, dad). It was an extravagant family holiday but it was a great way to mark such a significant milestone.

Our travelling party consisted of my parents, my brother and his family and then our menagerie of six. We would all meet in Orlando after our respective flights and head straight for Disney World where we would spend a week at the Boardwalk Hotel right next to Epcot Centre.

For me, the holiday couldn’t come at a better time. I had resigned from my job and I had a run-in to my final day that was a culmination of many different stresses that felt as though I would never make it out the other side, either alive or sane. The final day eventually arrived and I walked out of the office with my box, filled with a few files and bits and pieces, ending a chapter of my life from which I had learnt a lot of things and made me realise what kind of person I was and where my priorities lay.

I had absolutely no regrets from my two years, but it was time for me to move on to something that allowed me to reconnect with myself and my family.

I realised that the best kind of packing is the kind where you have no time in which to overthink it and so we threw our things in our bags and once I’d checked that we had all our passports, six people in the car and my camera and binoculars, we started our adventure with 28 hours of travelling to Orlando, via Dubai. I remarked a number of times suggesting that our routing was like travelling from Cape Town to Johannesburg via Windhoek.

In order to manage the volume of the blogs I have separated it into four separate entries.  You can click into each one individually:

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Disney, here we come

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The Oasis of the Seas to Nassau, Bahamas

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Hummingbirds, hurricanes and a bit of history

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Cold and busy in New York