I would like to wish you a Happy New Year 2026 to all of you and your family. Also, I would like to thank you all for reading my little blog.

As every Christmas, I took a little break during end of December/beginning of January to enjoy time with my family. This year we even travelled to and around France for two weeks. Here a summary of what happened in our life during the past three months (October – December 2025). Additionally, I am going to discuss my wishes for 2026. Hope you will enjoy it.

Personal Life:

Autumn months have been very busy at work both for Matt and myself, which has slightly impacted on my personal writing time for the blog and willingness to go out during the weekends. To be honest, the weather has not been great either, which didn’t help to motivate us to go out exploring. Most importantly, the biggest news for me during this autumn months was my change of role within my company. After being a nuclear consultant for 10 years specialised in the development of strategies for the management of radioactive wastes, I felt I needed a change and decided to move toward sustainability. I am now the sustainability lead for my company, which means that I am still working in the nuclear industry but for my company and not for external clients and I am dealing with a lot of different topics. So far so good and I am enjoying learning more about this field.

October – we had the visit of my mother. She stayed with us for two weeks, which meant that we did revisit some places in Cumbria with her. She really enjoyed the visit of Lowther Castle, Castlerigg stone circle and the Borrowdale valley.

November – was my birthday month, celebrating my 36th birthday with an afternoon tea with friends at the Hetland Hall Hotel near Annan in Scotland. It is a beautiful hotel and the afternoon tea was lovely. Definitely recommend it if you are around. It also reminded me how much I like doing afternoon tea with my friends and we agreed to try to do that more often.

December – it started with a couple of Christmas meals and then I caught a bad flu that put me in bed for a good 4 days. By the time I felt a bit better, it was time to prepare our trip to France.

Walking:

We didn’t do a lot of walking during last autumn. Just our usual local walks around Ennerdale or on St Bees Beach. We did however do a walk up to Walla Crag that I need to write about and with my mum we did a short walk to the caves of Borrowdale at the bottom of Castle Crag.

Travelling:

As we went on holiday in Spain at the beginning of September, we didn’t travel during autumn and waited for our Christmas break. This year we spent two weeks in France taking the ferry (Plymouth – St Malo and back St Malo – Portsmouth). As every time we go to France, we did a lot of travelling going from Brittany to the South West of France and then back up. This time we even spent a couple of days in Charente near Angoulême. I will soon write about these holidays.

Blogging:

Books:

I read several books during the end of the year and managed to overall read 32 books in 2025 (9318 pages total). I know for some of you, it is not a lot but for me it was so I am proud of myself.

Blog discoveries:

Unfortunately I won’t be sharing any blog posts this time as I haven’t had time to read the blog posts of my fellow bloggers. I am slowly catching-up with all their adventures before I can share with you.

After several years of thinking about it, I have decided that in 2026 I will stop writing in both French and English languages to only write in English. Writing in both languages is very time consuming and I am struggling to keep up, so instead of not posting, I prefer to reduce to one language. I also realised after talking with my mum, after she asked me why there were a good French version and a weird French version of my text written in my blog posts, that most people have google translation activated, which means that they either see two French or two English versions of the text in the same page. So here we go – to a blog in English. Please let me know what you think.

I am going to continue writing walks and moderating walks on Visorando website. See my Visorando profile here.

And we will surely use Home Exchange again this year to plan our holidays. We haven’t decided yet where we want to go but we are thinking about spending next Christmas in a sunny place. Any recommendations? Read about our experience exchanging houses here.

Finally, I would like to keep reading and discovering new authors during this coming year and hopefully be able to do more walks and enjoy the outdoors.

Let’s see what 2026 will bring !!!

What are your plans for 2026?