Cast your mind back to April if you can…
Back in April the world seemed like a simpler place didn’t it? Yes 2016 hadn’t started amazingly, some celebrities had died but we had no idea back then that Brexit and Trump would be coming later on to make the world seem like the crazy, crazy place it is today. The other thing that happened back in April is that we all went off on holiday to the Isle of Wight.
You may recall that last year I won a whole load of holiday vouchers in some little Facebook competition and so we were lucky enough to be able to book a more trips away than we might usually manage in a year and one of those trips was an Easter holiday back to where I still had fond memories of visiting as a ten year old.
We spent an amazing week on the Isle of Wight. Some of it I’ve blogged about already and some of it I may hopefully one day get round to blogging about. That’s the thing you see, you can start with the best intentions as a blogger, but real life (and 2016 has had plenty of real life) can sometimes get in the way.
Now normally I might be all upset about having not blogged about everything as soon as we got home, but this time it doesn’t matter as much. And there’s one amazing woman I need to thank for that – Liz Weston.
You see, not long before we went away Liz and her family took over the amazing Hope House Press. She knows that I’m a woman who appreciates a good bit of stationery (especially a notebook) and so she asked if she could send me one of her nice notebooks to review whilst I was away. Now, I’d heard of Hope House Press before, but until my (beautifully wrapped) package arrived from Liz I had no idea just how gorgeous their notebooks are in the flesh. Wow!
I remember unboxing my notebook and just sitting there stroking it for a while. Is that normal? Probably not, but it’s what I did.
Every time I go away somewhere I always plan to write a travel journal, but apart from our Honeymoon trip around New Zealand, I so often fail to actually manage to do so. My Isle of Wight trip was different though – and that was all thanks to my beautiful Hope House Press notebook. Each evening or morning I would sit in our beautiful holiday cottage with a drink of some sort and write about what we had been up to. Just doing so felt luxurious in a weird way.
What is particularly lovely is that now I can sit down and pick it up again and read about all the things that we got up to on that holiday. The places we went, the meals we had, and the things the kids got up to. It’s a lovely, lovely memory of a fantastic trip.
The wonderful thing about Hope House Press and their products is that they can all be personalised so that you could even go as far as having a notebook personalised for each trip that you do. How amazing would that look – a collection of all these beautifully bound books, maybe in an array of colours, each personalised with a different country name and each containing handwritten memories of trips you’ve taken.
My plans for 2016 were to travel more, especially as a family, and whilst we’ve enjoyed plenty of adventures here in the UK (mainly camping) we never did make it on one of the bigger trips we had been hoping for. Maybe that will finally happen in 2017, and if it does I’m pretty confident that I’ll be contacting Liz and asking if I can order for myself another special Hope House Press journal to be able to capture those travel memories in.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you want a beautiful personalised gift for someone who likes travelling, or just appreciates good stationery, then head over to Hope House Press’s online shop. They’ve got some utterly gorgeous products, that all arrive beautifully packaged, and I’m pretty sure the recipient will fall in love with whatever you buy for them instantly.
Disclaimer: Liz is a friend and sent me a personalised Hope House Press notebook for the purposes of this review. All opinions are my own. I love my notebook. Genuinely.
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