Backyard to Backpack by Evie Farrell

Author:Evie Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Having Mum with us was so much fun, but she worried that her snoring would keep us awake at night. Emmie and I returned to our room at the Maraya Hotel to find she that had set up a new bed for herself, inside the shower.

‘Mum, this is ridiculous, you can’t sleep in the shower!’ I laughed at her, but she was adamant that she had worked it all out.

‘After everyone has had a shower, I just dry it off, pull the mattress and pillows in and shut the door. It’s like an overnight cryogenic chamber,’ she told me.

‘Mum, that is crazy. We don’t mind if you snore. And you’re not a frozen body!’

She put her foot down and slept in the shower for the rest of our time in Chiang Mai. Utterly hilarious. Mums, huh?

A few days later, I received an email from Thai Airways, who said they’d been following our travels on Instagram and would like to work with us. This was such an amazing and unexpected offer—to work with one of the best airlines in the world! Thai Airways very generously wanted to fly us return to Sydney so we could test out their economy class with kids. We weren’t keen on going back home yet, but I wondered if they might fly us to Paris instead? I almost wasn’t going to ask, but I remembered my friend Simone’s favourite saying: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Paris was kind of the same distance away from Thailand as Sydney, and it was completely different to what we’d done so far. We wouldn’t have gone there if we hadn’t had this opportunity, but why not? So, I asked, and Thai Airways very kindly agreed. We were going to Paris!

It was a big day when I started finding my voice and feeling like we were valuable enough to be able to ask for things. At the time, I wasn’t confident and underestimated the benefits and results we could bring to brands and partners. I’m still working on that, and I think it’s a struggle that most women face, especially if we’ve been told for years that we shouldn’t think highly of ourselves. We need to love ourselves more, that’s for sure, and I teach Emmie this, too.

‘Emmie, guess what?’ I yelled when I received the email. ‘We’re going to Paris!’

‘Oh, Mummy, they said yes? Can we climb the Eiffel Tower?’

‘Of course we can, ladybug! That’s at the top of our list. And we can do whatever we like. Let’s practise our French to be polite.’

Emmie loves tall buildings. She adored Taipei 101 in Taiwan and obsessed over the Shanghai Tower in China, but she wanted to see the Eiffel Tower most of all. I couldn’t think of anything better than Paris with Emmie. I’d promised her we could go on her sixteenth birthday, but it was going to happen ten years earlier, lucky girl. I started researching where else to go in Europe, but planning ahead still annoyed me.

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