Dean Sas

One of the perks of working at Automattic, and perhaps my favourite, is a three month paid sabbatical after five years. Mine started on a Saturday in June and ended on a Tuesday in September, and I’ve now been back at work for four days, trying to remember how to do my job.

Ninety-three days is a long time. Long enough that a holiday stops feeling like a holiday and starts feeling like your normal life. You forget about work and adjust to a new normality.

I posted a short note every day on Bluesky, mostly to keep myself honest. The whole thread is here if you want the day-by-day. This is the version with the boring days taken out and some colour put back in.

Bikes

I rode a lot. That was always the plan.

The first week set the tone: a rolling ride through the Peak District with a stop at Eyam Tearooms. The next day I rode back home from Grindleford, finally ticking off the climb out of Hope Valley up to Surprise View. Mid week, a wet but flat 79km gravel ride to Lincoln and back the next day. Finally Friday brought a hilly 57km in the Peak District. I managed 286km in the first seven days, at which point my legs asked for a word.

Day ten was my biggest ride of the year up to that point, and also the day I went over the handlebars somewhere near Barnsley. First time I’ve come off in years. No real harm done beyond scrapes and a limp that hung around for a fortnight. Combined with the heat, it turned my planned ride to Leeds to a ride into a ride to Wakefield instead.

The centrepiece was a solo week bikepacking across the Netherlands – Hull to Rotterdam by ferry, then Utrecht, Den Bosch, Gouda, Den Haag and back to the ferry. I’ve written that one up separately in My First Bike Tour, so I’ll just say: the cycling infrastructure is unbelievable, the country is so flat you have to pedal constantly, and coming home to bells, dog leads and cars took some getting used to.

Later on, feeling I’d slipped into a comfort zone, I did a three-day mini-tour: off-road to Lincoln (34 minutes faster than in June), then along NCN1 to Long Sutton and on to Norwich. Two 100km+ days back to back, and my second-fastest hundred ever. The Fens were mind-numbingly repetitive and the train home was the slowest train ever, but I needed the ride.

Plus a lot of bike pottering: cafes, my parents’ house, the farm shop with the climbing goats, more cafes. Five days in a row of decent rides just doesn’t happen when there’s a laptop to open.

Hikes

The other big one was walking. Hugo and I did a 13km walk through Lathkill Dale, somewhere I used to walk often, but on a section he’d never seen. Later in the summer we walked the Peak District section of the Limestone Way over three days. 67km across country, carrying everything, finishing down Cave Dale into Castleton on the most scenic stretch. The middle day was 34km – my longest ever hike. We did it despite the heat, though the 5km between lunch in Youlgreave and ice cream in Monyash felt like forever, entirely because of me.

I was pleased with myself, but mostly proud of him. He set the pace, carried his share, never complained, and designed a tabletop game in his head while we walked. This was a few weeks after I’d picked him up from his DofE expedition buzzing at having done 35km with camping gear on his back, so I suppose I should have known.

Being a tourist at home

A theme I didn’t plan: visiting places I’d driven past for years. Haddon Hall is thirty minutes away and I’d never been. Renishaw Hall is twenty. Cromford Mill is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in my own county and we’d walked past it countless times. Also: Upton House, Bolsover Castle, the Peacock at Barlow, Sherwood’s fantasy festival, Alton Towers, and a weekend in Lincoln for the Tour of Britain, standing on the cobbles of Michaelgate as the riders came up five times. That was really exciting – and a great atmosphere.

Verdicts: Haddon good, Renishaw’s contents better than the house itself, Cromford’s tour ok but the cheese shop excellent, and a two-and-a-half hour tour of Lincoln Cathedral’s roof was absolutely fascinating, but was enough cathedral for one day. Hobbson’s of Lincoln do possibly the best pie I’ve ever had.

Upton House was a total whim. We’d never heard of it, but stopped there to grab lunch on the way to a Cotswolds distillery tour and discovered paintings by Bosch and Canaletto inside. A lovely surprise.

Chester Zoo got two days. We stayed overnight on site, which meant early access the next morning before the crowds – lovely and peaceful, with the giraffes having morning zoomies. Day one was hurtling from talk to talk; day two was going back to the animals we’d missed and revisiting favourites. The elephants are always good, the snow leopards were elusive, and the surprise favourites were the night monkeys. A lot of outside steps. Slept well.

Sicily

A week in Palermo with the family, which the British summer did not adequately prepare me for. Mosaics at the Norman Palace, Palermo Cathedral’s rooftop via hidden stairs behind a shrine, Greek and Roman sarcophagi in the crypt, a tour of a palazzo led by the contessa herself, and the Salinas museum, quietly hoarding the best bits of southern Sicily like a miniature British Museum. Monreale last, still stupefying even after a week of mosaics.

We ate more arancini, panelle, cannoli and granita than is probably considered healthy. Nobody would try the spleen sandwich though.

Making things

Miniatures, mostly. I’d started on a Star Wars Shatterpoint set in January and painted two figures but progress was slow. Over the sabbatical I painted the rest – figures and scenery – and we finally played the game. I lost. Also a Lego cactus, a lemon tart (I don’t bake anything that isn’t bread), a rack of lamb, several loaves, a fence and shed painted twice over (paint sprayers: horrendously messy), the deck oiled, pictures framed and hung, and some sketching in cafes. Nothing I’d call skilled. Most of it satisfying in a different way from work.

Games

I bought Factorio: Space Age on the eve of the Netherlands trip, reasoning that eight days without a laptop made it safe. It was not safe. Board games most evenings after Sicily, which became a nice tradition: Terraforming Mars, Courtesans, Villainous (the more I play Marvel Villainous, the less balanced it feels), and a session at Board and Bean that was meant to be one game and became several.

Books

The Talented Mr Ripley I could barely put down. Son of Nobody was really original and I liked it a lot. I reread the Rama books, all four from Rendezvous with Rama through to Rama Revealed. The first was better than I remembered; the three sequels a bit less good. The Wandering Earth has some great ideas, but short stories tend to frustrate me – several of these I’d have loved to see explored properly at novel length.

Two non-fiction: Luke Rowe’s Road Captain was interesting. He’s certainly not short on self-confidence. Dreaming in Code, the account of the Chandler project, was an interesting story about building software with a fairly predictable ending. And a Sedaris that turned out to be meh.

The rest

Films: The Odyssey (fantastic), and Masters of the Universe on Father’s Day (good dumb fun). Three spa days. A selfie with Brian Blessed. Cocktails, karaoke and a hangover for our 22nd anniversary. Sara’s birthday, my birthday, a distillery tour, a weekend with friends in Birmingham.

Work-work happened exactly once: a bug report on one of my WordPress themes led me to file a bug of my own. I did some vaguely work-like stuff – I tinkered on the Cycle Chesterfield site and wrote a newsletter article for them, and I booked some work travel for when I returned.

What I’d say about it

Three months is long enough that it stops feeling like a holiday. The first few days I had to consciously adapt to a life without structure – a bath with a book, a slow toddle round the supermarket, a picnic with a sketchbook – and then it just became the pace.

It had two distinct halves. Until the school holidays it was mostly me, and I filled it with long rides and solo trips. Once Hugo broke up it became family time: the walk, Sicily, the zoo, theme parks, board games. Both were good; they were different sabbaticals.

Posting every day helped. Knowing I’d have to write “day 44: hangover” was a mild incentive to do something worth writing down. It also let me spot when I’d got too comfortable, which is how the Norwich mini-tour happened.

The last day it was just me and the cat. I rode my favourite local loop and had lunch out with a book. Then it was goodbye to a life of serenity, and back to the chaos.