Back in the fun times of 2020, I had moved back into my parents house in Scotland after flying home from New Zealand and it looked like my dream of becoming a year round surf coach was over (or at least, shelved for the foreseeable).
Fast forward from March to the 4th of July when the UK opened up again for the summer and becoming a surf coach was a reality again! Little did I know, this season would be different. Not only was it the busiest summer Cornwall has ever seen due to the popularity of UK “staycations”,
but it just so happened I was going to meet my future wife!
Finding a place to stay in Cornwall over the summer is hard enough but I was lucky to find a rental house with a few rooms available and not too far from the Ticket to Ride Perranporth Surf School. I moved in and not two days later, Lucy moved into the room next to mine.
Fast forward again a month of surf coaching together, car pooling to the surf school, cooking and just generally hanging out, we ended up going on a few dates.
Lucy had previously been working for Ticket to Ride in their Exeter office, so the fact that Covid happened was actually in my benefit. If it wasn’t for covid, Lucy wouldn’t have come down to Cornwall to coach at the Surf School and we probably would never have met. Or maybe we would have but further down the line.
After a year together and enduring more and more lock-downs in the UK, the world finally opened up and Lucy and I were asked to lead the first Sri Lanka 10-Week trip since Covid.
We surfed together, lived together and loved running trips together. I would really recommend an experience like this with a partner as you really get to know each other and need to work as a team pretty much everyday!
I’ll blow past the next four years but we’ve now spent three seasons together in Sri Lanka for Ticket to Ride as well as returned to South Africa (which I experienced as a TTR customer in 2010, and was the first trip Lucy worked on in 2018) to help run the trip and add some updated visuals for the website and socials.
Writing this in November, we are now just seven months away from our wedding! But before that happens, we’ve got one more stint in Sri Lanka and what looks to be an epic week in Spain with some past TTR Riders. And finally in June, we’ll welcome friends, family and our epic TTR family to Scotland where we’ll be getting married. All thanks to the weird experience of covid and the amazing, life-changing trips of Ticket to Ride.
