My DD married an Australian nearly 22 years ago. They have 3 grandchildren, 2 working, 1 still at college.
We visited every year when the children were small, taking 3 weeks of precious holiday off work.
Covid interrupted this, we haven’t been for 5 years now, what’s stopping us is they all just seem so busy now, with work and different lifestyles to when the children were small, and DD was a stay-at-home mum. Now she works also, and although I hope she would be pleased to see us, having mum and dad over for a three week holiday is not the same as it used to be. Plus with FaceTime and similar, it’s not a case of not seeing her as such.
We don’t know our Aussie GC as well as we know our son’s teenagers, who live locally, but at 18 and 15, we don’t feature half as much in their lives as we did years ago, when we were more needed and dare I say useful.
DD is 50 next year, I hope we get over to see them then, as DH and I are of course getting older, and you realise time is racing by.
I too, wish she lived in Europe say, just three or four hours flight away. That would be great.
Finally, I used to get so fed up in Lockdown when other GP’s, here on GN and elsewhere, bemoaned the fact they had been apart from families for weeks on end.
I felt like saying “Join the club!”