We're not the type of people who prepare for a trip by visiting travel agents, reading guide books and googling travel sites. Although I do like the thought of a nice neat itinerary, I'm not sure our family could ever stick to one. Our way of traveling is to make it up as we go along. Sometimes we don't know where we are going next until the day before. Occasionally we are limited by our last minute decisions but mostly things just have a way of working out.

Without too many plans we are open to other people's suggestions, we aren't stuck in tight schedules and we have the freedom to follow our hearts wherever they take us.

Not knowing London at all, I put the call out on Facebook a few months before we left home asking for suggestions of where to eat, what to do and where to stay. I was completely overwhelmed by the response and instead of trying to break my pattern and book well ahead, I left it and went off to focus on more pressing things like packing and planting garlic instead.

Fast forward a month and we found ourselves in Israel with a week until London and nowhere to stay.

So one hot afternoon while the girls were making a horror movie on the iPad, we got on the Airbnb site and booked an apartment for five, as close to London as we could find and crossed our fingers.

Later on that night, or maybe the next, we were flicking through the TV stations and came across a program about the street art, vintage shop and cool market tours in Shoreditch. A quick check of our Airbnb dashboard confirmed that we had hit the jackpot!! The gorgeous warehouse apartment we had booked was in Shoreditch and within walking distance of all these awesome places. So cool!!

We didn't end up taking one of those tours but we did discover a lot of it by ourselves and we loved it!! At the end of our lane way there was a long white building site barrier put up as we were leaving home on the Saturday morning, by the time we got back that night it was covered in the most incredible paintings (it was too dark for a photo - sorry). Everywhere we looked we were greeted with something incredible. Our elbows were sore from poking each other to look over here and over there.

Amazing!!

I'd best be off now, it's time to plan for our next destination. Paris maybe? Seriously!!

And just out of interest, are you a travel planner or do you make it up as you go along like we do?


Lotsa love to you guys, I hope you are making marvellous memories.

Love Kate xoxo