A milestone birthday comes with the urge to turn long-held travel dreams into reality. 

There’s nothing like a milestone birthday on the horizon to give you pause for thought. From finally learning to speak Spanish to exploring my home country and creating new memories with loved ones, here is all the travel I want to do before I turn 40 – in just under two years’ time. I better get moving.

Time out: an adult gap year in Latin America   

High stress. Burn-out. A post-pandemic shake-up of priorities. The ability to work remotely and stay more connected than ever in our digital age. All of these factors are contributing to the rise of the adult gap year, and it’s a concept I could get onboard with. 

Traditionally a rite of passage for young people between school and university, I considered it the first time round: having just studied Spanish, the idea of backpacking around Latin America like my contemporaries appealed, and I spent hours on dial-up internet researching language schools in Havana and Buenos Aires. I imagined myself on the flipside: a fluent Spanish speaker and a worldlier version of my 19-year-old self. 

Would that have transpired if circumstances hadn’t led me straight to university instead? Who’s to say. But now, almost 20 years later, I’ve still never made it to Cuba or Argentina and I’m still dreaming of that gap year.

Home soil: reconnecting with my roots   

I’ve travelled to all corners of the country during my decade of living in Australia. But, like many expats, my voracious travels in a place I didn’t grow up in has me realising how much of my home country I haven’t seen. 

So, I want to explore more of the UK. I want to spend time with friends and family in my beautiful West Country, the south-west corner of England I grew up in that’s known for its rippling green hills and cider apple orchards. And then dart across the Severn Bridge to Wales to explore its mountains, myths and medieval castles. 

I want to finally make it to the Lake District, a land of long walks, gastro pubs and Beatrix Potter legend that I only ever glimpsed as a child through train windows en route to visit relatives in the Scottish Borders. 

Belmond’s new luxury sleeper train, Britannic Explorer – which has itineraries traversing Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District – might be just the ticket. 

I’m not alone in feeling the pull to reconnect: in 2023, 47 per cent of Australians visiting the UK did so to visit friends and family, and ancestry tourism is on the rise around the world from Ireland to Italy as travellers seek to reconnect with their roots. 

Slow travel: a summer inter-railing Europe  

In the early noughties, the romanticism of travelling across Europe by train still lingered (fuelled, no doubt for me, by the discovery of Richard Linklater’s 1995 Gen-X classic film Before Sunrise, where characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train and alight for one fateful night in Vienna). 

Back then, the thing to do was spend a summer university break interrailing around Europe. To pack a backpack, buy a pass and sketch out a rough itinerary that will take you – dog-eared Lonely Planet guide in hand – across a patchwork of European countries. From the world’s great cities like Paris and Prague to places with names you can’t even pronounce, bursting with character and history. 

But then came the explosion of budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair offering low-cost airfares that fundamentally changed how we travel. And soon I was tempted by £10 flights opening up places like Krakow and Lisbon as viable weekend destinations. 

This explosion of low-cost airfares, we now know, would contribute to issues of overtourism in hotspots across Europe. And we are now coming full circle in our return to slow travel. 

As it turns out, interrailing is still very much the thing to do. Branded as Eurail in Australia, this rail pass allows you to travel at your own pace by train across up to 33 countries. I’m sketching the itinerary in my head as we speak: heading to corners of the continent, like Ljubljana, that easyJet never took me to and I think I can now pronounce. 

Plain sailing: a multigenerational holiday  

Multigenerational travel took off in a big way as we emerged from the pandemic with an urgent need to reconnect with loved ones. And the trend is showing no signs of slowing down. 

The 2025 Virtuoso Luxe Report identified multigenerational and immediate family travel as numbers two and three on its list of top travel trends. And in September 2024, Booking.com published its inaugural research on intergenerational travel across APAC. Findings in the Gen.Voyage! report included that almost half (47 per cent) of Aussies value the opportunity travel affords to reconnect with family they don’t often get to see, while 42 per cent relish the chance to bond and create shared memories. 

My mum and I cruised together a few years ago and it remains one of the most memorable travel experiences I’ve had. The ease of a cruise holiday – where the only things you have to worry about is which restaurant to eat in that evening and which shore excursion to pick (Sicily: a visit to the Godfather village or a farm-to-table lunch at an agriturismo?) – really does mean more time to soak up quality time together. After a day spent exploring, we cherished our sunset ritual: a conversation over a glass of wine up on deck, watching the sky wring out its colour. 

I want to recreate that experience a few years on. Perhaps another Mediterranean sailing or a river cruise of France’s Bordeaux region, where my mum lived as a language student in the 1970s, and where we can toast with a glass of local red wine and create new memories. 

Milestone travel: the big 4-0   

Another post-pandemic trend that is continuing to boom is milestone or celebration travel, in at number five on the Virtuoso Luxe Report’s top travel trends for 2025. 

For my 40th birthday itself – in just under two years – I’m dreaming of a celebration where I can get all my friends and family together. I’m picturing hiring a villa. White-washed and somewhere beautiful like Hydra (a Greek island I visited and fell in love with a few years ago). For the kind of proper two-week holiday that fools you into thinking ‘this is my life now’. 

I’ll wake up late to breakfast on a sun-splashed terrace overlooking the port; meander through cobbled streets for a swim in the sparkling sea; read books in the shade of a bougainvillea-festooned terrace; and eat and drink and be merry into the night with all the people I love most. 

It will be a full-circle moment – a trip to the Greek Islands when I was 13 was my first ever ‘proper’ holiday and the first time I flew on a plane. So, my milestone celebration will tap into another travel trend that millennials are increasingly embracing: nostalgia tourism. 

I think I’ve got some travel planning to do.