All About Zig Zagging the World
‘Here’s to all the places we’ve been and here’s to all the places we’ll go.’
We’re Colin & Liz, a UK couple with a love of travel. After 32 years together where we enjoyed a diverse range of holidays fitted into our lives working in construction and accountancy respectively, we have decided to take early ‘retirement’ in 2023 to travel more extensively around the world.
Our travel companion and trusted steed in all of this will be Lo11y, an Iveco Daily 4x4 with a comfortable living area on the back. See About Lo11y for more details.
Colin is originally from Bolton (and still get depressed at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon when Bolton Wanderers come second again) and Liz from Hertfordshire, both ending up in Northampton for work.
We bought a beautiful cottage in a Northamptonshire village in 1991 which has been our base for the last 32 years. From early on in our time together we enjoyed travelling further afield usually independently, although in the year 2000 we discovered the joy and benefits of cycling which has tended to be the mode of at least one of our trips each year since, taking us to Vietnam, Cuba, Southern India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Taiwan, Madagascar, Japan and Borneo, plus some nearer to home self-guided cycling holidays in Italy, Switzerland, Norway and Albania, France, Belgium,.& Holland.
We also discovered the joy and freedom that campervan trips offer, being the transport and accommodation in trips to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland and in the UK
In between all of this we took a 3-year career break from 2005-2008 to experience more than the confines of a 2-week holiday from work allows. During these 3 years we spent a year in Africa (on a charity truck in West Africa, on an overland truck in East Africa, then in a hired 4x4 camping vehicle in Southern Africa), 4 months in Asia (mainly Sabah in Borneo working on a Raleigh International Expedition), and finally 18 months in Central & South America in a pickup truck with a truck camper unit on the back called Frank & Betty.
We had an incredible 3 years, saw amazing wildlife and sights, had new life experiences doing voluntary work, and most importantly met some amazing people, both locals and fellow travellers, who inspired us. Not being very IT literate at the time we documented our trip in diaries and periodic updates to family and friends which we complied into a self-published book with photos on our return. You can read these ramblings in the ‘Past Travels’ section.
It was hard to come back to the UK in 2008 and start back on the 9 to 5 jobs again, and far from satisfying our wanderlust this trip had convinced us we still had a lot more we wanted to do. We planned on working for another 10 years before quitting for good and setting off again. The 10 years has turned into 15 years, but we feel it is time to strike out again while we still have our health and knowing that as we get older, we may become more risk averse and miss out on experiences we have long dreamt of.