‘ My best break was the least planned ‘
TV presenter Adrian Simpson is a familiar face from a host of popular shows.
He was part of the original Top Gear team and also presents Police, Camera, Action and The Gadget Show.
The 42-year-old has three children — aged eight, six and one — with wife Amy. They live in the heart of the Sussex countryside.
Adrian can currently be seen in BBC One’s Fightback Britain, which he co-presents with Julia Bradbury.
My all-time favourite holiday just has to be my honeymoon.
“It was the one I planned least and got the most out of.
“Amy and I went backpacking to Borneo and Malaysia for five weeks.
“We had the first two nights booked at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur and after that it was just a case of winging it.
“I’m a bit of a history nut and I’ve always been interested in the countries for military history reasons.
“And I also wanted it to be somewhere different because so many people talked to me about Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand.
“It was so good that, honestly, we didn’t want to come back.
“It was just 10 years ago but it was the last time I’ve sorted any holiday without the use of the internet.
“I just had a travel guide and I’d phone up hotels on the day and ask if they had anything.
“We went up Mount Kinabalu and stayed on a desert island, Lankayan, that you could walk all the way round in five minutes.
“We also went up river in canoes and stayed with people in old longhouses.
“My childhood memories are of two very different places.
“My dad was born in Edinburgh but was brought up in Pittenweem in Fife.
“We went back there many times and he’d tell us stories of when he was there during the war and Polish paratroopers would train by abseiling down the church steeple.
“His ambition as a kid was apparently to make a wheelbarrow which he could use to meet tourists at the station and take their suitcases to their B&Bs!
“The last time I camped there must have been 30 years ago but I can still clearly remember the site with its little pine huts.
“And I can still taste what my dad called the mealy puddings — white puddings — which we’d get
from the fish and chip shop.
“The other big family favourite was France.
“Not surprisingly it rained a fair bit in Fife so my dad took us across the Channel and I just completely fell in love with it.
“We’d drive down the Loire Valley towing this huge great caravan.
“The camp sites we stayed at didn’t have any kids’ clubs or entertainment, just the beautiful countryside all around.
“But I loved the emptiness of the place and it just sparked something in me.
“The more I got to know the area the more I grew to love it, the streets, buildings, everything.
“So much so, that I’ve always wanted to go and live there.
“It hasn’t happened yet — but never say never.”