A charmed life

I was sitting by the pool the other day, drinking a coconut juice, pondering where our travels have taken us. (As you do). A frangipani flower fell into the pool and was tossed about, bobbing and floating on the surface. It's just like us, I thought; it's a metaphor for our trip. We are the flower and the pool is fate, tossing us where it will. I'm pretty sure there wasn't any alcohol in that coconut, so maybe it was the sun causing me to make such cliched and corny observations. Anyway, it did get me thinking about luck.

We are lucky people. In many obvious ways, of course: having all this time to travel Europe, having the means to do it, having charm and good looks, etc etc. But also in the sense of random, serendipitous luck. That's how it's been during the past 12 weeks.

This trip has been charmed, in a way, and I'm really not sure why that is. There are so many situations where things have gone amazingly, when they could have turned out the complete opposite. For example, choosing Le Piggonet hotel in Aix en Provence - which we did randomly on the lastminute.com web site the day before we travelled there - set off a whole chain of amazing adventures in France. At Le Piggonet we met the lovely Stephanie, who set us up at Le Moulin de Lourmarin, and Le Couvent in St Maximin la St Baume, and who recommended Le Jardin d'Emile, in Cassis. These were places which were all extraordinary, and which we never would have found ourselves. (I checked - none of them rated a mention in our guide books).

Random choices, which we've made as a consequence of planning as we go, have worked out better than well almost every single time. The place we chose to stay in Mallorca - which we picked by pointing to a picture in a Barcelona travel agent's office - could have been one of those dreadful places on the beachfront surrounded by pie shops. (We had no way of knowing from the photo). But instead, and quite randomly, it was secluded, traditional and had a great restaurant. Ditto Phuket; choosing places to go based on their web sites is always a tricky endeavour, not to mention the difficulty of booking in a holiday resort place a day or two before you plan to turn up there. Our options were narrowing rapidly the day before we left London when we decided on Treetops, which we thought we could book and then if we hated, move on from after a couple of days. When we got here it was beautiful, they told us they had upgraded us and here we are, sitting in splendor on our sun deck, the panorama of the Andaman sea and palm trees set out before us. See? Lucky.

Food choices have been similarly charmed. We have eaten hundreds of meals, and really, only a few - less than a handful - have been duds. I think we've gotten really good at picking places now; my restaurant radar is now highly developed. Who needs guide books? I prefer to look at how happy the people are in a place, how smugly they look back at me, how the food looks on their plates. In Cassis, the place I honed in on, and where we ate twice, stood out a mile to me among the dozen others at the port. After we'd eaten there, flipping through my folder, I found it had been recommended in several UK food magazines. So I'm not unearthing hidden treasures, but I do have good taste.

I think we maybe have made our own luck in some ways. by being open to whatever happens. We are good travellers, I think, because we take our time, and are willing to be guided by what we find along the way, and we're not rigidly pursuing particular sights or attractions. We are happy to do nothing in a place. This, as I've said, is really affected by the fact that we've had so much time; I might be more inclined to tick things off a list had our time been limited to a few weeks.

An area in which we've been amazingly lucky - and over which we have zero control - is the weather. Europe in September, October and November was always going to be autumnal. But everywhere we have been, we have had brilliant weather, and practically everywhere, locals have said to us "It's not usually like this at this time of year", or words to that effect. Believe it or not, in nearly three months we have had only three or four rainy days. This has had a huge effect on what we've been able to do, as well as our general moods. We're starting to think we carry our own little weather system with us; even in London, although freezing, the sun shone every day. Which it doesn't always do.