The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel

The joy of the mini-mini-break

Overnight getaways in the UK are the new weekend in Rome, says Anna Hart

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My friend Roxy is being romanced by a 23-year-old, and on a recent date, as he was effusing about his hopes and dreams and ambitions, she delivered the sort of death blow you only hear from someone a decade older: “Honey, the secret to happiness is low expectatio­ns.”

She mentioned this as we set off on our big post-lockdown getaway: one night at a Kentish glampsite an hour from our Margate flat. You might imagine that as a travel writer, I had much bigger plans for the reopening weekend, that I’d surely be camping overnight outside Stansted like a crazed shopper hell-bent on scooping up beige bargains at the Next Boxing Day Sale. But when we finally learned that the UK was tentativel­y opening pubs, hotels, campsites, borders and flight paths, I kept my aspiration­s simple. “I’m booking us a mini-mini-break,” I told Roxy, hoping this jazzy new moniker for an “overnight stay” would make it sound more glossy and glamorous.

But I’ll say this: after three months of my social life peaking with a weekly Zoom quiz, exploring lesser-known corners of my sofa and eating nothing I didn’t cook myself, this night in a restored gipsy caravan stood out in my calendar like a weekend in Rome. Lockdown has been a gratitude boot camp, my taste buds are supercharg­ed, and I suspect it would be a shock to the system to jump straight from my sofa to a sunlounger in the Caribbean.

This doesn’t mean my travel aspiration­s have withered away, or I’ve lost the ability to dream. Far from it. I extract bang-for-buck from any holiday by relishing the daydreamin­g stage; packing an outfit for outlandish eventualit­ies like being invited aboard a superyacht, or being stranded overnight on a deserted island after a trip with a questionab­le diving company.

I enjoy reading about my carefully chosen destinatio­n, scouring Instagram accounts by local food bloggers, watching movies that will flavour my experience­s – my travels begin long before the airport. So, for now, I’m happy to bide my time, enjoy a summer of mini-mini-breaks, and slowly plot a true show-stopper of an adventure for later in the year, or early 2021.

I’m also grimly aware of the many uncertaint­ies facing travellers right now, and setting my pandemic-weary heart on a July trip to Dominica felt like a dangerous dream. We’ve endured months of things being cancelled – festivals, sporting events, weddings – and a cancelled holiday at this stage might just have finished me off.

So I chose to keep my expectatio­ns low, because I would rather be a surprised pessimist than a devastated optimist. When I was younger – about 23, I suspect – I thought low expectatio­ns were the same as low standards. I associated them with laziness, hopelessne­ss, lethargy and general ennui. Now I know that it’s possible to dream big, while keeping expectatio­ns small.

During the strange summer of 2020, keeping my travel expectatio­ns low means keeping the stay short, distances small, cost low and plans simple. So I booked the delightful Nut Plat Retreat (nutplatret­reat.co.uk), near Shipbourne, for Sunday, knowing we needed to do no preparatio­n whatsoever other than popping into an M&S Simply Food on the drive for wine and barbecue fodder. The whole point of glamping is that you can be packed and ready in under half an hour. We’re paying for the luxury of not having to dig out a tent from the attic and remember where the hell our headtorch is. We’re paying to not have to obsess over the forecast as a weekend huddled under canvas in the drizzle looms. We’re paying for not having to decant instant coffee into Tupperware. I will happily fork out £120 a night for these things.

Even though this plan was simple, I giddily looked forward to soaking in the wood-fired hot-tub under a full moon with a glass of wine. I was able to daydream big about this small adventure, safe in the knowledge that if Roxy, myself or our hosts had to cancel for any one of countless Covid-related reasons, we wouldn’t wind up stressed, out of pocket and bitterly disappoint­ed.

Like many travellers, I had grand plans – travelling from LA to New York by rail over six weeks – dashed by the crisis. But Britain is one of the planet’s best destinatio­ns for low-key, lowstress, low-cost holidays, rich in farm stays, glampsites, country house hotels and boutique city stays. I already know my staycation summer of mini-minibreaks will defy my expectatio­ns.

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