How to Know You've Found the Right Friends to Travel With

You are in your thirties or forties. You’ve just come back from a trip with three or four women, and you are already thinking about the next one. Most of the groups you tried this with in your twenties would not have survived a long weekend. A group trip at this stage is a specific project. These friends are the result of it.

You agree on museums. You all either love them or hate them to the same degree. There is no one dragging the group through a third wing of a modern art museum while someone else sulks on a bench. Even the ones who didn’t really want to go are up for it, having a laugh interpreting a sculpture. And when the museum is done, you all know, without discussion, that it is time to sit in a café and people-watch for an hour with a coffee or a glass of wine.

Everyone has a role. The navigator. The restaurant booker. The one who brings enough paracetamol and antihistamine for a small clinic. The one with the snacks. The one who turns up at the gate with a bottle of something from duty free that nobody asked for but everyone is glad about. No one assigned these. They just are.

Shopping balances out. You all like it, and somehow you all leave any given shop at roughly the same moment. Nobody is standing by the door with her coat on while someone else tries on a fourth jumper. And if that does happen, nobody minds, because it doesn’t happen often and your friend is genuinely delighted with the fourth jumper.

There are tea shifts. Without anyone organising it, someone is always awake first making coffee for whoever appears next, and by the third morning it has rotated without comment. Everyone knows how everyone takes their tea by the end of the weekend. The kitchen of the Airbnb runs like a very small hotel.

Everyone is pushed, gently. The food you would not have ordered. The experience you would have said no to at home. Nobody forces it, but everybody nudges. And if it is too much — if the tasting menu turns out to be very, very long — someone steers you back out. You tried. That counts.

The camera roll. You realise, scrolling home on the plane, that you have not taken a photograph of just yourself in months. Just the kids. Now the roll is full of selfies from the walk back from the wine bar. Someone climbing onto a stone lion outside a civic building at eleven at night. Four women laughing so hard they cannot take the photograph. You would not have done this at home. You would not have done it with other people. You keep them all.

What none of you quite say, but all of you know, is that you did not find these friends in your twenties. You found them later. Through work, or school gates, or one of you moving countries. You are only on this trip because several small things happened to land in roughly the same month for four separate adult women. Two of you have toddlers at home. One of you took annual leave for this. One of you has a lot going on and has not told anyone yet.

The trip is not really about the city. It is about being, for three nights, somewhere nobody needs anything from you. The museum is a prop. The wine is a prop. Even the friendship, in a sense, is the setting for something quieter: the version of you that exists when you are not being anyone’s mother or anyone’s colleague. She is still in there. You had forgotten.

You land back at your home airport at eleven on a Sunday night. Somebody has already started a group chat about June.

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