Welcome! I’m Jim!

Hi, I’m Jim – father of two, husband of one and my wife, Mel, nagged me to start Boarding Passes Ready because she was bored of reading overly energetic holiday reviews where people climbed mountains, hiked over sand dunes or backpacked around Europe whilst looking suspiciously immaculate and Instagram-worthy.

Where’s the blog for … you know … normal people who are always running late for the flight, pitch up with a half-packed bag and a half-formed plan, and who generally make it all up as they go along? Well, that’s here. That’s me.

Am I a professional travel blogger? Hahaha no, not by a long shot. I mean, sure, I’d like to be a travel blogger, but I’d also like to be Daniel Craig and perhaps also like to be a billionaire, but liking something sadly doesn’t make it so. Sadly, if you read through these pages, you’ll just find my disconnected thoughts about places Mrs. B and I have been to and enjoyed – despite our lack of aforementioned planning.

That said, I’ve always loved travelling, and as the old joke goes, there are only two real classes of travel – first class, or with kids. It used to be a lot of the former, these days it’s definitely the latter but that’s ok – it’s always nice to see a small face look up from an iPad screen to view a wonder of the world or a smashing sunset in between bouts of destroying things on Roblox.

Travel for me started young – I was tricked into joining the Army by a cunningly worded advert in a depressingly drab Army Recruitment Office in a depressingly drab High Street that showed a teenager roughly my age relaxing on a beach in Belize and the lure of state-funded travel. “I could have a bit of that!” I thought.

Fast forward three months into the Army, and while there was indeed a number of fellow teenagers my age, there also seemed to be an awful lot of shouting, marching and running and my polite enquiries as to when the Belizean beaches would be happening were met with threats of violence towards my person if not direct violence towards my soul.

Fortunately, after a while, the Army did indeed make good on its promise to help me see the world, and in short order paid me to go to Gibraltar, Belgium, the United States, Kenya, Cyprus, Germany, Austria, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Singapore, France, Afghanistan, Scotland, Turkey and so many times around the UK it made my head hurt.

Sometimes it was a week or two, sometimes for a month or two and sometimes for a year or two and the longer trips really made me appreciate the local culture in depth, in a way you’d never get in on a normal holiday.

I mean, no one who ever booked a Thomas Cook holiday to Cyprus has ever had the fun of arguing about VAT relief on importing a car to the island or had the joy of your luggage being stolen by Saudi Customs Officials.

Having well and truly caught the travel bug for free – well, not exactly for free – I did have to spend several years of my life wearing a very unflattering camouflage outfit – I’ve tried to keep that going now I’m a bit older and have a beautiful wife and kids in tow.

Wherever we go somewhere, I’ll try and pen a few words down. Most of it seems to make some sort of sense to me.

Enjoy!