I had high hopes and expectations for Budapest and it definitely didn't disappoint.. Budapest was our final destination, and my husband and baby came out to meet us there for the final four days of our trip. We had an amazing and central Air Bnb, and spend the days wandering in Buda and Pest, doing a few touristy things, enjoying the sunshine, eating well and cheaply, taking photos and catching up.

Vienna ended up being one of my favourite places that we visited. I had no real idea of what it would be like.. I imagined the buildings would be ornate and it would be beautiful but that was about it. Vienna is cool, beautiful but gritty. Maybe not quite as cool as Berlin, maybe not as beautiful as Paris, but like their love child, taking a bit from each. And they have a bakery on every corner. What's not to love?

We ended up popping over to Bratislava after getting off the night train in Vienna because I had an extra travel day to use on our pass, I literally looked at a map and thought "Hey! It's an hour away, it's worth a few hours to see somewhere else?"

​​​​​​​After Zermatt we travelled up to Zurich, ahead of catching a sleeper train at around 10pm that night. We arrived around lunchtime, left cases in storage in the train station, and went straight out exploring. We found a park on high ground where people were playing boules and chess, which had beautiful views over the entire city. We walked down into the old town, through to the harbour and looked out onto Lake Zurich.

Zermatt is the perfect little ski town. It's isolated (no cars allowed, there are only electric buggies and horses on the streets), picturesque and small enough that you can wander around the entire place easily on foot. I'm so glad we went for two nights, we had a day skiing and visiting the glacier experience, and we explored and ate galette, raclette and crepes.

Montreux was just heavenly.. Not the most lusted-after tourist spot in Switzerland, but just beautiful. It's a town set at the other end of Lake Geneva to Geneva itself, and our train between the two was just over an hour. The buildings were beautiful - some reminded me so much of The Grand Budapest Hotel - but when we arrived it was early evening, and although we could see lights twinkling in the mist over the lake, there wasn't much else to be seen because of the visibility. The next day it had lifted and it was just beautiful. I think I ran to the lake-side as soon as I saw the mountains that morning..

So! At the end of March and into April my eldest daughter and I took a trip together. If you follow me on Instagram at @sallythurrell or @sallytphotography you may be up to date with where we visited, what we saw and how it went.. and you can see the outline of our plans over on my personal family blog here. 

I'm going to dive deeply into very personal stuff today on the blog (if you're looking for wedding films and table decor inspiration then keep scrolling..), this is a post and a project I worked on just for myself. I took a series of photos last year and couldn't face looking through them and editing them for a while, but eventually did, and these are a few favourites.

January creeps by so slowly then suddenly it's March! Did anyone see February? Did it even happen? Anyway, time for another 'Behind The Curtain' post - a little personal post about what's been going on behind the scenes for this Teesside wedding photographer (shameless SEO writing, there..)

Did you make any new year's resolutions? I realised about a week in to 2018 that it hadn't even crossed my mind. I've since made a few small business resolutions and I have some general targets.. but writing a list felt like setting myself up to fail.

As promised, I'm keeping up with sharing more personal photography on the blog this year - just little snippets and highlights here and there. Over on my Instagram @sallytphotography - followers said overwhelmingly that they'd like to keep up with travel and personal creative projects, so here we are!

As my ongoing effort to make my blog a bit more well-rounded (and generally to keep on top of it!) this year, I thought I'd share more personal project work and some more travel photography..

I've decided to transform my blog this year and put a little bit more consideration into how I'm posting out into the world through it; I'd say it's a 'New Year's Resolution' but it just feels that declaring that adds more pressure than I'd like..

Behind The Curtain is going to be a new series of blog posts to showcase personal work, talk a little about what's been going on in my everyday life, and what work-related projects I'm working on and what's coming up. You may be aware, or not, that I keep a family blog too called Our Little Gang - so this is going to tie in with that blog and its posts too..

It's been so, so long since I shared any personal work! It always takes a bit of a back seat when I have 'real' work going on but it's always such a joy to shoot just for myself too. These photos are actually a year or so old - I was asked by my good friend Hannah to shoot with her on the Amalfi Coast (um... YES PLEASE) and we decided to take an extra day or two to explore while we were there. I was actually 6 weeks pregnant when we went so this time couldn't drink *all* the wine but I did eat *all* the food to make up for it..