Today is Easter weekend and apart from thrusting myself into the festivities I find myself worrying about why I decided to go on another long trip. I have a perfectly good home, business, a family who needs me from time to time and many, many friends.

Still too late now! In fact that should be my slogan because all my life I have always seemed to engage the mouth before the brain. “Ann, we’re going to take a cruise from Singapore to Rome, want to join us?” “Yes, that sounds great”.

I’ve done this before. Three years ago I booked myself on to a 4 month trip around the world without flying. On 27th March 2011 I joined 22 idiots like myself and traveled by coach through Western and Eastern Europe to Moscow where we boarded the trans-Siberian express, stopping off in Siberia and Mongolia on our way to Beijing. We spent 10 exhilarating days touring China by coach and train before boarding a cruise liner to cross the North Pacific to Alaska. We then headed down through Canada to the USA ending up in New York. I then came back home on the Queen Mary. It was massive.

We stayed in hostels, camped and sometimes slept overnight on the coach.

Last year I took myself off to Australia to visit my grandson and we toured for 6 weeks in a camper van, dodging floods, then on to another cruise liner to cross the South Pacific, stopping off at exotic Polynesian Islands along the way. From San Francisco I made my way to Palm Springs to meet friends and we drove back to Seattle. Again, massive!

So here I am again, a tad panicky, wondering what the heck I have let myself in for, about to meet up with a couple I befriended on the high seas between Sydney and San Francisco last year.

They live in Melbourne and are more than 10 years younger than me, but apart from that are kindred spirits. Angelo is an independent builder and Jill hates pretension (as do I). All joking aside, we seemed to “click” and had a great time on the ship.

Last autumn Jill had invited me to join them at their beach house just outside Melbourne for the post-Christmas period. I was SO tempted, particularly as my grandson lives there too, but I decided to be a responsible grown up and stay put for a while! Why on earth did I think that? Particularly as I then booked myself onto a 12 day Christmas cruise to Madeira!

Jill emailed me again a few weeks ago with this current proposition and all resolve went out of the window because, as everyone knows, that’s what windows were built for! After all, it’s rude to keep refusing isn’t it? And so begins another period of (I hope) riotous fun.