‘To have a year off was an incredible experience… I would mandate it’

Barry and Claire Mullins, 58 and 48

We had a year when we both quit our jobs, rented out our house and travelled,” explained Barry. “Some people said it was stupid, but it was something that we had talked about, and three years previously we had bought a campervan.” When Barry had a “very minor” heart attack in 2016, that spurred the couple on, and in April 2019 off they went with their poodle: first to Scotland to drive the North Coast 500, then around Ireland and Northern Ireland, before crossing the Channel and arriving in Normandy for the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Heading up to Scandinavia, via Germany, they visited Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland; by the end, they had explored 28 countries. “We went everywhere that we could get to,” said Barry.

Renting out the house worked well for the Mullins’s. “If our mortgage was paid off we might have left it empty,” said Barry, “but it helped us pretty much break even.” They have both since returned to work, “but we didn’t jump back on the treadmill”.

Would they recommend the grown-up gap year?

“I would mandate it,” Barry said. “Everybody should do it. We had never had more than three weeks off work in one go, so to have a whole year off was an incredible experience.”

They would love to do it again and go back to all those places that they missed the first time: “We could do it all again, easily.”