Kiara Gallop

The fact that I was spending more time at home during lockdown (working from home two or three days a week) meant that I had more time to dedicate to looking after my new house guests. Seeing as though I was initially only going into work for one day per week, once I’d got enough groceries to last me a few weeks, I would’ve been stuck at home for the remaining six days of every week, had I not decided to take full advantage of reason number three – daily exercise. Every day I’d consult the maps.me app on my phone and find a footpath that I hadn’t followed before, an area I hadn’t visited or a landmark I hadn’t photographed. I’d like to completely redesign my dining room, replace the carpet with a laminate floor and get some lighter, more modern pieces of furniture and a proper dining room table, but home improvement projects are expensive and I haven’t managed to save up enough money for that one just yet.

In light of this, it’s unlikely that your travel-loving friend or family member has been able to travel abroad this year, or that they’ve even been able to book any trips for 2021. Although not all of the books I’ve read have been travel-related (I think it’s good to mix things up a bit), I do enjoy finding those that allow me to travel vicariously, and which teach me about a country’s culture, its people and the historical events that have shaped it over time. My friend Jayne and I completed a large number of day-long walks in Shropshire this summer, and it’s a fantastic way of getting to know the area in which you live a little better whilst at the same time satisfying your curiosity for exploration and adventure. as though none of us can really plan travel right now, there’s a high probability that your travel loving friend or partner’s next getaway will be a pretty last minute affair – unless of course you’re planning on treating them to gift idea number three on this list 😉

Almost entirely enclosed within the loop of the River Wear, Durham is best known for its Norman cathedral and 11th century castle. However, its abundance of picturesque riverside walks, listed buildings (there are 569 in the city centre alone) and independent shops, bars and restaurants are also very good reasons to love this “perfect little city. On the morning of our second day in the city, we dropped down on to the river path close to our hotel, and followed it south and around the bend of the river loop as far as Kingsgate Bridge. We stayed at the Radisson Blu, located on the banks of the River Wear, just 600 metres (or a 10-minute walk) from the city’s cathedral.

(we could leave a large chunk of it at our hotel in Carlisle, where we’d stopped the night before), the first day of experiencing what it’s like to do a long distance walk with a fifth of my body weight on my back was the second day – from Carlisle to Walton. If you’re not bothered about being able to say that you’ve walked the entire length of the Hadrian’s Wall trail then I would definitely recommend focussing your attention on the section between Walton and Chollerford, and perhaps skipping the section between Chollerford and Wallsend altogether. , we didn’t even consider walking all the way to Tynemouth; walking Hadrian’s Wall (all 84 miles of it) sounded like enough of an achievement. Yes, Jayne and I had achieved what we’d set out to do; we’d walked the entire length of the Hadrian’s Wall trail.