A road near Batcombe in Somerset, UK, where the author learned to let someone else take the wheel.
Photographer: Emli Bendixen for Bloomberg Businessweek
How to Spend Five Delicious Days in Somerset, a Perfect UK Road Trip
Ignore the algorithm. Forget what your friends told you. Block out the in-laws’ advice. For some vacations, all you need is serendipity as your guide.
“So, where are you going?” my mother-in-law asked a few weeks before my husband, Charles, and I were scheduled to leave for several days of child-free bliss. Almost two years overdue on celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary, I was still drawing a vacation blank. My mother-in-law was shocked. “You’re normally so on top of it!”
She was right. I’ve been a travel editor for more than a decade; knowing where to go is literally my job. But I’d been trapped in a paradox: The thing I needed most—rest—was incompatible with my dreams of parental freedom. After all, relaxing places like beach resorts are the default when “vacation” means 24-7 child-minding.