A place that feels like home

15 Aug

Written By Laurence McCahill

In my early 20s (the early 1990s 🤯), I travelled around the world for 18 months.

I spent extended periods in India, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia before working for 6 months in Australia.

Over that time I stayed in A LOT of backpacker hostels and guest houses.

There were some shockers.

Some rooms had no windows.
Too many had cockroaches and rats.

But every now and then there was a hidden gem.

Even though these weren't 5* star hotels, real care was put into them.

There were:

Comfy lounge areas
Great home-cooked food
Homely touches
A games room
Tasteful lighting
A communal stereo
Library areas for swapping travel books
Guest books full of kind words and stories

But more than anything, a feeling.
A feeling of home.

And of love.

It got to the point when you could smell it when you walked in.

You knew it, because it was all too rare.

And because you were so far away from home (and there were no mobile phones or internet back then), when you experienced it, it was bliss.

Then a funny thing happened.

On the last leg of that trip I created a drawing of my perfect venue:

After travelling for so long, I wanted to create a place where people from all around the world would travel to visit, taking the best bits of all the most inspiring places we’d stayed in.

I was done moving around, so I wanted others to come to me.

It was a cross between a hippy hotel and a campsite.
There was a feeling of community.
There was laughter and games.
Learning and sharing.
Great food.
And kindness.

It would bring out the best in people, because they were treated the best.

It would have the best guestbook in the world.

But it never happened, or so I thought.

I completely forgot that I drew this vision in 1995.

Only to be reminded of it a couple of years ago by my wife, when we hosted our 10 year anniversary of Summercamp.

“Remember that drawing that you did, of that place?”

And then it hit me like a bolt.

The vision for Summercamp was there 20 years before it became a reality.

So go visualise your dream.
It may take a while.

But slowly, subconsciously, you might just get there.

(P.S. Sadly I don't have the original drawing, so ChatGPT helped me for this one.)