About Us: from 300-Day Honeymoon to Family Adventures

Hi! I’m Steph, a primary school special needs coordinator, keen photographer, and travel addict from Derbyshire. I share our family travels on Instagram @four_go_exploring. The handsome fellow in the pictures below is my husband, Dean, a very smart engineer from Cornwall. We both suffer from severe cases of wanderlust!

Dean proposed to me with a plastic ring cleverly sealed inside a Kinder egg in the May of 2013. He’d even made some proposal instructions to accompany it. We’d been together maybe 3.5 years, beginning to explore the world with our backpacks: Peru and Bolivia, India and Sri Lanka, and a trip from Turkey to Slovenia.

We decided to get married in September, giving ourselves 3.5 months to plan the travel-themed wedding of our dreams. That’s us, being photobombed by a cow. And the cake, made by one of my incredibly talented bridesmaids!

And what’s the best way to counter-balance a very short engagement? A very long honeymoon, we thought! So that’s what we did.

Five days after our wedding, we flew to South-East Asia and spent about five months visiting Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia (including Borneo), Singapore and The Philippines. Then we stayed for ten days in Japan on our way to Central America. We landed in Los Angeles and made our way to Mexico before winding our way down through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. After a short flight, we landed in Ecuador where we briefly revisited Peru on our way to Chile, then worked our way back North through Argentina to Brazil. We returned to England at the end of July 2014, pleased to see our families and friends but definitely not cured of our wanderlust!

Here we are in Cambodia, looking very young!

The idea of this blog was a light-weight, less labour-intensive alternative to the journals I used to write/draw during trips. My posts from this 2013-14 trip don’t age too well – I didn’t edit any photos at all – but they’re staying for now! Sadly, our honeymoon and life on the road are dim and distant memories, but I continued to blog about all our foreign trips, to Iceland, Indonesia, Northern Ireland, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Nepal, Italy, Romania, India, South Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho. Now and then, I write a bit about adventures closer to home too. You will hopefully discern an improvement in quality from 2015 onwards and an upturn in usefulness in recent years!

In 2019, we welcomed our daughter, Small, into the world. We secured her a passport and were all ready to spend maternity leave travelling until, when she was four months old, the pandemic put all plans on hold. Finally, in April 2022 (with baby number 2 on her way), Small got to use her passport on a short trip to Sardinia. Since Tiny’s arrival, we’ve adventured to Crete, Zakynthos, Mauritius, Spain, Portugal, Costa Rica, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Sri Lanka and the Maldives as well as UK trips to Cornwall, Devon, Wales and the Lake District. Slovenia and Croatia are up next!

With over 40 countries to choose from (plus several more I’m working on), and a whole section dedicated to recent travel with kids, I hope you’ll find something to interest or help you.

If you’d like new family travel posts direct to your inbox, drop your email address here. I promise I don’t write them fast enough for you to feel spammed!