Tag: holiday

Make your own coffee and go on holiday

Posted on by Sara Walker

holidayStatistics can be scary; you know, the kind that tell you exactly how much you’ve spent on chocolate, cigarettes, alcohol… (insert your creature comfort here) over the last 10 years.

I’m not going to bombard you with lots of preachy data, but I will tell you that I recently came across a study outlining that about one third of us in the UK say we can’t afford to go on a one week holiday. I thought, that’s a bit sad; we all deserve holidays!

Anyway, at the same time, I discovered that as a nation we’re drinking more takeaway coffee than ever before. If you’re a fan of your morning shop bought coffee before work, you’ll know that the average cup costs about £2.

So, this is where I propose the ‘coffee beans from your coffee machine’ plan. OK, it’s a simple suggestion really, but a helpful one — stop buying so much takeaway coffee and instead, invest in a small home coffee machine, stock up on decent coffee beans, then get yourself a flask and start making your own coffee. It’ll taste better.

Or even better, lose the flask, and just bring your coffee machine to work and get everyone involved. If you buy takeaway coffee every day, that’s £10 you can pocket away every week. You do the maths for six months.

And now, here’s the best bit — in 5-6 months time, you’ll have saved up enough to go away somewhere. It’s not going to take you to the Caribbean, but there’s loads of places you can go with a couple of hundred quid if you’re a bit creative with it.

Here are some money saving holiday suggestions you can try out once you’ve saved all the money making your own coffee.

1. Buy a cheap flight, then stay somewhere lovely and for free with couch surfing.

2. Go camping in the UK. There’s a lot of people with pretty gardens who rent out the space in the summer to campers. It’ll be cheaper, prettier and you’ll have more space.

3. If you’ve got any old friends who moved away, go and visit them for a week.

Coffee Inspired Holidays & Vacation Spots

Posted on by Sara Walker


If you consider yourself a coffee lover you probably try to sneak in as much coffee as possible to your life. And not only in the form of freshly brewed cups of coffee to indulge in, but also ice cream, alcoholic drinks and other desserts that have coffee flavour (do you know that you can cook regular meals with coffee as well? Apparently soaking your beef in coffee works great as a tenderizer…). In addition to this there’s coffee inspired art and even paintings made with coffee. Of course there’s also the books, the coffee shops you need to visit and all the gadgets you need to buy…like that brand new espresso machine, or French press… You can actually take it further than this though and go on a coffee inspired vacation. If you love coffee, what better way to spend a holiday than at a coffee farm, or visiting a city where the world’s best coffee is served?

Brazil isn’t just home of one of the greatest carnivals on earth, but also a lot of coffee farms. A lot, a lot! You can combine a visit to the carnival with several visits to coffee plantations. You even have the option of going horseback riding through them!

One place to visit for a splendid coffee vacation is Nicaragua. This Latin American country has a lot to offer its visitors, not least the beautiful mountainous Matagalpa region where coffee is grown. There you can stay in eco-lodges and combine an environmentally friendly (minus the flying) vacation with some great coffee tasting.

Kona coffee is a very rare variety as it is only grown in Hawaii and the islands aren’t particularly big. It is also the only coffee grown in the USA. Of course when visiting Hawaii there are many other wonderful things to do such as watching the whales, visiting the rainforest and going surfing – after all it’s surfer’s paradise.

Italy. What can we say? Home of the espresso and definitively worth visiting for many other reasons also. There is stunning history to be found in Rome and the natural beauty of Tuscany. There’s romance in Venice and enough pasta in every town to make your mouth water!