APT 1. Abandoned Parent Training
(Dordogne Cycle Touring 1/6):
January is a good time to think about summer, a time to look back at the sunny highlights of 2020 and to anticipate the warmer months of 2021.
January is also a time for New Year’s Resolutions. One of mine is to get fit for next summer. I’m sure you agree that doing a blog sprint definitely counts, especially as it’s far too cold outside to do any real sport. So here is the first of six daily, light-hearted posts featuring pictures of summer.
My favourite moments of 2020 revolved around my bike and – by strange coincidence – a couple of local breweries along the River Dronne in the Dordogne.
These weren’t planned as bike ‘n’ beer trips. Far from it. The aim was to develop a new skill.
Let me begin at the beginning. In June, my youngest child finished high school and enrolled at university. Faced with the prospect of becoming abandoned parents in September, my partner and I decided we needed to do some training to prepare for this change in our lives.
We’re not very good at training. In 2019, for example, we failed miserably to train for our cycling trip to discover the source of the River Charente. We thought that Abandoned Parent Training (commonly known as APT) would be easier to achieve.
But what does APT consist of? And would we be apt for APT? (sorry).
Basically, APT teaches you how to stop your life revolving around your darling offspring.
We’ve always dragged our daughters around with us. Like most parents, we prefer sharing our activities with our kids. This is purely selfish, of course. Discovery is great but when you discover through the eyes of children, it’s ten times more exciting.
So, as part of our Abandoned Parent Training, we decided to make an effort and choose an activity to deliberately exclude them. Come to think of it, our first attempt at excluding our children was the aforementioned River Charente cycling trip in 2019. As I only invented APT ten minutes ago, I’m now wondering whether I devised the Charente trip subconsciously as an APT activity.
Whatever. We had such fun at the River Charente in 2019 that we decided to begin our 2020 APT sessions with another cycling and camping weekend.
Our daughters – who have no idea about APT – just thought we’d finally accepted that they had better things to do with their time than to accompany us. We understand they have important things to do, such as studying and learning how to cook. When they heard our idea, I’m sure they planned to work on those life skills. It seemed they wanted to give their friends the opportunity to develop their life skills alongside them, too. My daughters have exemplary social consciences.
(You see why I need APT? Hardly a sentence goes past without me mentioning my children.)
Anyway, in June, soon after the first Covid lockdown was over, we packed our tent, bikes, face masks and hand gel into (and onto) our car.
We drove across the deserts, mountains and forests of… Well, of the Charente. We thought it best not to be too far from the local hospital in case the kids’ cooking went wrong.
An hour and a half later, we arrived at our first APT destination.
If you’d like to know more about the two Dordogne APT sessions we managed in 2020, come back tomorrow and I’ll share the first instalment with you. There will be photos, I promise.
