"We've been to eleven countries. The trip that changed everything cost €40."

By Sarah Mitchell · 5 min read

We are not people who stay home.

Between the two of us, my husband and I have done safaris in Kenya, rented villas in Croatia, spent three weeks driving through Japan with no real plan and somehow not killed each other.

Travel is just what we do. It's how we decompress. It's how we celebrate things. It's how we argue productively and then make up over dinner somewhere with a view.

So when our daughter turned nine and asked if we could "go somewhere with rides", I thought: fine, easy, one weekend.

I'd never really taken theme parks seriously as a destination.

I'm going to have to walk that back now.

Because the first time we walked into Europa-Park — proper Europa-Park, the full thing, not a half-day — something shifted in how we think about trips altogether.

It wasn't the rides. Well. It was partly the rides.

It was that my husband, who has planned seventeen international trips with military-grade spreadsheets and strong opinions about airport lounges, turned into a completely different person. He was competing with a nine-year-old over who got to pick the next attraction. Losing, mostly. Accepting it happily.

And our daughter, who at home exists in a permanent state of mild boredom with everything we suggest, was grabbing both our hands and pulling.

We stayed two days longer than planned.

On the drive home, before we'd even crossed back into France, the conversation had already moved to: which one next?

That was three years ago.

Since then we've done PortAventura twice, Disneyland Paris in December — which I'd resisted for years and turned out to be genuinely magical in a way I find slightly embarrassing to admit — Alton Towers, Phantasialand, and Gardaland with my sister's family last summer.

We started keeping track because my husband, predictably, needed a system.

A friend had one of these bottles — stainless steel, stickers for every major European park — and I thought it was a bit much at first. Then I realised we already had a list. We were already comparing parks, rating them, debating the next one like it was a proper project.

The bottle just made it visible.

Now it sits in our kitchen and every sticker is a specific memory. Not "that theme park trip". The exact afternoon. The queue we almost gave up on that turned out to be worth it. The dinner after where nobody looked at their phone. The moment my daughter fell asleep in the car and we drove in silence feeling like we'd actually done something right.

Some of those are €200-a-night hotels and flights planned six months out.

Some of those have been weekend trips squeezed between work trips and school calendars. Nothing elaborate. Just the park, the three of us, and nowhere else to be.

But they all count.

Because now we're not just travelling. We're completing something.

My husband has a running list of the parks we still haven't done. My daughter audits it regularly and has strong opinions about the order. I have learned not to argue with either of them.

We probably won't finish the bottle for another ten years. Maybe fifteen.

That's fine. That's the point.