So another summer, another two week visit to the UK done - and we are already looking at Christmas flights 🙄.
We (DH, me, two DSs) live in outside the U.K. - two hour flight away. Both our families are back in the UK. We’ve been here 16 years. We used to meet up here and have holidays together in summer, and we’d visit every second winter, but ageing parents and Covid seem to have knocked that on the head. The onus is now very much on us to visit them - and it’s getting so tiresome and expensive !
The current ‘routine’ is that we go in summer for 2-2.5 weeks and either Christmas (every second year) or February for two weeks. It’s costing us a fortune. Despite that fact that we have all our families (parents and siblings) living within a couple of hours of each other, only my parents have a big enough place to house us or a spare car to lend us - and they live rurally. So we end up scattered between different households or we shell out for accommodation, plus we have to hire a car to schlep children, luggage etc between different households or rely on lifts all the time. All to sit in various living rooms, drinking tea and making chit chat. Neither of us get any quality time with our siblings as we are always so bloody busy organising activities for children (houses are all too small for them just to hang out at home so we are constantly off to water parks, climbing parks, etc), or visiting older relatives in care homes, their homes etc.
So DH and I are really struggling to get motivated to go for Christmas - although it has been two years since we went (Covid). Looking at prices for travel, accommodation, car hire - we are already into the £1000s and idk if we can afford that.
Btw we can’t host visitors here: our place is too small. In the past we’ve met up at holiday homes, but this doesn’t work anymore. DHs parents are too old to travel, his sibling either can’t afford or doesn’t want to holiday anywhere, and my sibling wants to go elsewhere for her actual holidays. Like I say, the expectation is very much for us to go there every time now.
Mostly I’m just having a moan about something that used to work well, and now it just doesn’t. I’m starting to think that a twice-yearly visit is not sustainable either financially or mentally, but that’s the current level of expectation by all our families and our children (who love going to the UK: they are the only grandchildren / nephews on my side so they get spoilt rotten and are really close to my parents): it’s just DH and I that are getting sick of it. Should we just suck it up for the sake of everyone else ?