Introverted, extroverted, easily bored, hopelessly romantic… no matter what you and your partner are like, there’s a break for you
Sicily, not long married. Afternoons too hot for anything much other than stretching out indolently on the sand and swimming in sea bright and clear as cut glass.
In the mornings we explored, mainly in first gear; Sicily is full of hills and ravines and switchbacks snaking this way and that, so vertiginously steep you wonder if your little Fiat will make it. Sidewinding up and up Etna’s fertile slopes one day – ears popping, temperature dropping – we passed a pair of bobbing bottoms, shiny in his-and-hers Lycra: the Cycling Couple.
Perhaps it was the altitude, but how acutely we felt it, that galactic stroke of luck that they, the powerful of calf, were together on their bikes and we, with our shared propensity for indolence, in our car. “Every old sock meets an old shoe,” as Kate Bush put it.
Travel has a mischievous way of throwing a spotlight on our compatibility. It is not just about hobbies and interests so much as an attitude to life and an outlook on the world.