If you already know us, or are following the blog to learn more about Damian and Joanne, you probably all have the question of, why the lifestyle change? This is a huge change and journey for us and it has probably been in our heads since 2011. Although people only started to realise in 2016 when we announced we were looking to move from Leicester to either Wales, the Lake District, or the Yorkshire Dales. So why the lifestyle change?
Well here is a really open and honest account of our lives and the reason I, (Joanne) have decided to write this and share it so publicly is because if we are expecting you to take your holiday with us, then wouldn’t you want to know who we really are as people, as opposed to just a couple of hosts.
If I take you back to 1999, we had been together for five years and wanted to get married and start a family. We did indeed have a fabulous wedding and following this, spent the next 12 years trying to have a baby, going through IVF. We even adopted two boys for a brief period only for us to be devastated that they could not settle and the decision was taken in their best interest to go back to their fostering situation with a different level of care.
I personally could then not take on another adoption that was offered, for fear the same would happen again and wanted to draw a line under trying to become a family. This left us with the path in life to either constantly be angry at the situation and sad that we did not have a family, or to take on life with the new perspective of all the amazing other opportunities we could take on. We did just that.
(Bottom images by Melia Melia Photography)
We travelled and learned a lot from these experiences. I developed a whole new outlook on life and suddenly experiencing life in different parts of the world became more important than having designer jeans hanging in my wardrobe. When I travel, I appreciate how lucky I am with everything we have here in the UK. The urge to give something back, because we do have so much and have been given so much support and love and opportunities in life, kept ticking away in the back of my head. I’ll be honest and say the urge to travel the world, or live overseas was more of a constant thing in my head, but Damian was right in that after a year, what would we come back to.
Life Changing
I had felt for a long time that I wanted to volunteer and given that I wanted to live abroad, I was drawn to opportunities in other countries. Whilst Damian was interested in this also, the problem lay in that volunteering either came in the form of teaching, or building and not something that we would both enjoy. Plus Damian did not want to just do two weeks in a country and then walk away feeling that he had not contributed properly to a community. That’s where Raleigh International came in, in that we could take on sustainable, responsible volunteering for 3 months with projects that we could both use our career expertise in. So we took a sabbatical from work and off we went to Costa Rica and Nicaragua for four months in 2014.
For us, the experience of Raleigh was life changing. It is not the same for everyone that does it and we were so lucky in that we had an absolutely positive expedition. I get the most memorable goosebumps when I think about it. I have made the most treasured friends throughout the world who I think of when I wonder if we are doing the right thing with our approach to St Marks. I learned more about the world in 3 months than I had in 16 years of education. I am not afraid to quote the cliche of it changed my outlook on life yet again and this is what led us to opening St Marks.
We want a life that feels like it does when we go on holiday and we want that for you also. We want to surround ourselves with the experience of meeting new people, of switching off from the internet to get outside and live. To learn to cook new recipes with others, to spend the night laughing around a dinner table and to opening ourselves up to new things every week of the year and not just two weeks of the year.
We want to share our lives with others and learn from all of you. We want St Marks to be the place that people book to stay in because it takes them away from what is culturally expected and instead live life for the moments and not the things. St Marks Stays is not about perfect bed sheet corners, but it is about real life.
Why the lifestyle change … well to quote a great movie … Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.