OUR
Story of Happiness
By Esme & Zac
8th November 2018
How our trip began...
It's pretty hard to imagine life any different than it is now. We currently take each day as it comes... we wake up each morning and plan our days from there. But it wasn't always like this!
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This time three months ago, we had been waiting three months for our Australian Visas. We were working 60-80 hour weeks in a bar whilst enjoying each day of the best that we could (between naps). Alongside this, Esme was driving from Cornwall to London when she could to get the best experience she possibly could in her dream career of Marketing. We didn't have the time to stop and think about another way we could be spending our youth in a way that would create the most happiness of all! We didn't feel like this way of living was anywhere near coming to an end.
One morning we were sat eating breakfast in Wetherspoons (Spoons of all places, we know right haha) when we decided we had to make a plan to live the best lives we possibly could. I came back from ordering our food to Zac sitting excitedly with the most mischievous look on his face! He couldn't even wait until I had sat down to blurt "I HAVE A PLAN". I have no idea how long it had taken for me to get served but it must have been a little while (in true Spoons fashion) because by the time I returned he had mapped out an entire journey. We would start by island hopping for one month in Thailand, move on to Bali for two months and then plan the rest from there.
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Two days later we had booked all of our flights, handed in our notices and were ready to leave the country in two weeks time with no plans on coming home (except for Christmas!)
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How we met...
Having lived in the same little fishing village for our entire lives, it was pretty strange that we had never met up until two years ago when we began working together. We come from a tiny village called Polperro in Cornwall, England and lived only one estate apart. Polperro village has a population of about 1000 people and yet we had never met. We had hundreds of mutual friends on Facebook and we even went to the same primary and secondary schools! However, Zac is five years older than me which meant that everytime i began, he had just left and we missed each other by the skin of our teeth. I knew of his younger sister, Chloe from her being just two years older than me and yet... Zac and I never even knew each others names.
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At the end of 2016, I applied for a job at the restaurant that Zac was working at and we hit it off straight away. We spoke about everything and anything, especially places we had been and places we had always wanted to go. We joked around behind the bar and overall made the quieter winter shifts much more bearable for one another. However it wasn't until over an entire year later in December 2017 that we realised that our connection might be more than just friendship. By this time, Zac had already spent months helping me to book my first big trip for January 2018...
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This meant that as soon as our romantic connection begun, we knew we only had a few weeks left together until I flew to the other side of the world for 8 weeks...
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We must have eaten at almost every single restaurant in the surrounding areas of Polperro in those weeks. We were inseparable. We spent every single day and night together before we had to say goodbye for two months.
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The night before I had to leave, i felt so conflicted.... On one hand, I couldn't wait to experience my first adventure outside of Europe. I had only ever been as far as Spain before! On the other hand, we both couldn't stop thinking about the fact that we weren't going to see each other in two months after only really spending a few fleeting weeks together before I left.
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The morning quickly approached and Zac enveloped me in a hug so tight that I think he might have winded me. I grabbed my belongings from his room, gave him one last kiss and left. Zac spent the next 20 minutes lying on his back and staring at the sealing, unsure what to do from there. He knew that I was leaving at 11am so without another thought, he threw his clothes on and ran up Talland hill (it's a very VERY steep hill in Polperro) as fast as he could to meet me before I left. 10 minutes later, knocked on my bedroom window, watched my eyes light up and picked me up into one last big bear hug.
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I couldn't get off my flight fast enough knowing that Zac was waiting for me at terminal four at Heathrow Airport. I grabbed my bag which-of course- came off last, almost ran to the exit and there he was, waiting for me. He gathered me up into the very same bear hug that he had just before I had left, right in the middle of the airport. People were rushing off around us to get to where they needed to be next but for us, time stood still.
We were exactly where we wanted to be...
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