DVD's on Your Gap Year

Despite the fact that we were in some wildly exotic places (to us) and every minute should have been spent exploring and just enjoying where we were there were many times when we got fed up of exotic and just wanted to chill.

Regioned

As we carried the laptop with us we sometimes used it as a portable DVD player. This was wonderful until we got regioned out and got stuck watching the same 4 DVD's dozens of times.
It was absolute heaven when we bumped into other families along the way who were just as eager as we were to swap dvd's.

Swapping

If the DVD and thought of the electric Nanny floats your boat (I loved her!) when you network with other families before you go and have a vague plan to meet up along the way, discuss swapping DVD's and make sure that you don't start out from home carrying the same ones.

Languages

Eliza was learning German for school and Savannah French so most of the DVD's that I took with us offered german or french dubbing or subtitles so I made the children watch them in either language. So if we watched the dvd in German we had subtitles in English and so on.

Worked a treat and my language skills came along too.

A reassessment of life

Fiona Carroll felt she had been neglecting her own life in favour of her job as a project manager for a software company in Switzerland and decided finally to take a full year's break:

I had been thinking for years and years that I needed to take a break but never did. The pressure just got too much. The break led to a reassessment of life and where I was going. I'm now more aware of a need for breaks and how little time we all have in our lives. There's more to life than work and it's good to take a step back.

She decided to take a full year's break to spend time with her family in Ireland and also to take painting courses in Switzerland. She believes her old company would have kept the job open for her but she wanted a change to decrease the amount of time she spent at work and obtain a better balance between her job and her private life. 'I didn't want to travel. I just wanted to be.'

Remaining at home gave her the opportunity to pursue her love of art. She started taking lessons in painting near her home, which she is able to continue still by working a four-day week. She takes every Tuesday off which she describes as 'wonderful'. She is determined not to surrender so much time to her work nor to succumb to the rat race without a fight. Inevitably this involves taking home less pay, but the arrangement has improved her quality of life immeasurably.