Location, location, location

I like where I live. For those that don't know me personally, that's in a little village in Kent in the south-east of England. I don't just like the village itself - although I do like it, very much - I like the actual position of the village. I'm surrounded by beautiful countryside, much of it walkable from my front door, yet a main town - well, city, actually - is just a couple of miles away (also walkable if I had to!). If I go north, east or south, I'll reach a coastline - I have the choice of sand or pebbles, plus some beautiful white-chalk cliffs. And if I go west - north-west to be precise - just 60 miles away are all the sights and sounds of London. Okay, so we haven't got moors or mountains, but we have got the best of most worlds. A stroll through fields to a country pub? Check. Day at the beach, building sandcastles? Check. Quick visit to town for some shopping? Check. Bracing cliff-top walk? Check. Castles and cathedrals, museums and monuments, woods and wildlife parks, cinemas and soft-play - most things that you want can be found within a 20-mile radius of where I live. Living close to our capital city also brings a host of benefits - just a relatively short drive or less than an hour on the fast train means that it's easy to pop to London for the day or for the weekend. It's easy for us to see all the tourist sites and then some. It's also easy to see a West End show or a concert at one of the wide variety of venues London has to offer. And have I mentioned the weather? Generally speaking, the south-east is pretty lucky - we're in a little pocket that usually gets ignored when bad weather hits the rest of the UK. Obviously we don't always get off scot-free - we had some 'interesting' flooding last year. But we are usually warmer than a lot of the country - right now, it's a beautiful sunny day, while large amounts of the country are covered in snow.

So how does this relate to holidays? If I like where I live so much, why do I keep escaping it? Well, that's another reason I like it so much. I've already mentioned the ease of a short break in London. It's also simple to get to Sussex, one of my favourite UK counties - lots of beautiful coast and tons to do for children. Admittedly it's not best-located for most of the rest of the UK; to get out of Kent, hitting the M25 is almost unavoidable - and anyone who's been on the M25 knows it's akin to sitting in your driveway with the engine running for an hour. But outside the UK? Well, that's a different story. We have five airports within relatively easy reach. Sadly, none of them are that close (RIP the so-convenient-but-never-quite-took-off Manston Airport), but Gatwick and Stansted are both just over an hour away. We also have Heathrow or Luton not too much further (depending on the state of the M25, of course) or the as-yet-untested-but-may-be-useful-one-day London City. The joy of this is that we can go pretty much anywhere we want without having to worry about connecting flights, and we get far more choice over flight times and prices. Often, one airport works out cheaper than the others or has better flight times, and lots of airlines (budget ones in particular), only fly to/from certain airports or only to limited destinations from some of these airports. Having Heathrow, the country's main airport, nearby is particularly useful for long-haul destinations, as flying from many other UK airports would involve a domestic flight to Heathrow first.

But the real pull of our location is our proximity to France; we're less than half an hour away from Dover, and it's only 20 miles from there to Calais. Admittedly, that's still an hour and a half on the ferry, but that's not so much different to getting the (slow) train to London. It's a much easier way to go abroad than flying - no parking problems, quick check-in, no hanging around, and it's much quicker to get to Dover than Gatwick. The Eurotunnel is even quicker, and the Eurostar quicker still - although the prices increase accordingly. Still, it's pretty amazing to be able to get on a train in Ashford and be in Paris a couple of hours later! But back to the ferries - we're lucky enough to be fairly frequent winners of ferry tickets (and there's another blog story), which means the ferry is usually our transport of choice. And, once in France, the rest of Europe is easily reachable - less than an hour to Belgium, and the Netherlands aren't much further. The ability to pop across to the continent for the day or a weekend is a pretty good one to have. Recently, we realised we had a few ferry vouchers to use up before they expired, so we scheduled in a day-trip to Boulogne, managing a visit to Nausicaa, lunch, a play on the beach and a walk around town, and were still home for dinner. A couple of weeks later we went to Bruges for a lovely Christmassy weekend. I feel so lucky that such trips are relatively easy for us to do. We're also lucky enough to usually have the time over the summer to drive down to Spain, taking our time by stopping frequently throughout France - and Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg... Of course, you could do it much more quickly if you had less time, and you'd save an absolute fortune on flights.

This summer, we're planning to capitalise on our location and head to France again, probably driving down to Spain and perhaps even visiting Italy. And in the meantime, just a stone's throw away, we have Canterbury - famous for its cathedral; Dover - famous for its castle and white cliffs; Margate - famous for its sandy beaches; Whitstable - famous for its oysters... Living here, I really do feel that the world is my oyster.