In the summer of 2025 we planned and booked the holiday of a lifetime to Argentina and Chile. This included trips to vineyards, Michelin star restaurants with wine flights and all sorts of apartments with perfect balconies for sundowners. On September 14th, after a particularly nasty bout of hanxiety, I quit the drink.
So here are my observations on how I navigated a sober holiday.
- You need a sober buddy at home. The secret to sober buddy success is, I think, to communicate with them every day even if it’s only a meme swap. That way your relationship isn’t just crisis management and misery. Emma was much more able to deal with my ‘**** me EVERYONE in this bar is drinking shots’ moment after several racoon videos.
- It’ll be harder than you think. I’d navigated a sober festive season with my family and New Year celebrations in Riga. I was bossing this new sober life. Turns out I absolutely was not ready for the visceral reaction to the waft of a rich Mendozan Malbec past my nose.
- Not everyone will understand. In Casa Vigil, a very fancy schmanzy restaurant, our place settings were flanked by nine wine glasses each. When I explained I don’t drink there was slight panic and I was presented with an unopened can of Sprite.
- Mocktails are a thing of great joy. And several of your five a day. Seek out the most glorious and try not to flinch when you see they are the same price as their boozy counterparts. I also discovered coffee and orange juice, together. Yes indeed together. Should be vile, is in fact delicious.
- Feed your sobriety with books, podcasts and socials. I had Kasey McGuire Davidson for company on 12 hour bus journeys, Catherine Gray’s wonderful book ‘ Sunshine Warm Sober’ in my rucksack at all times and several insta accounts for quick fixes of reassurance. Also make sure your happy place is close by – living in Skye mine is in the sea. The tides were too rippy in the north of our adventure to swim but I still managed to spend some time in the waves.
- Plan, Plan, Plan. Afternoons with nothing to do used to be filled in pubs or beachside cocktail bars - boredom is the enemy of the newly sober. So I rinsed Get Your Gui de for activities. 6We learned how to make the perfect mate in Buenos Aires, travelled all day through the Andes on a mad bus with a madder guide and got up at 3 am to go on a whale watching boat trip. All without hangovers. Watching the sunrise over the Franciso Coloane Marine Park beats any blonde beer dopamine hit. Who knew?
- Watch your sugar. When I first stopped drinking I substituted pastries for booze. Then they became a habit. This was a bit of a surprise as I’ve never had a sweet tooth and I let it get a little out of control. Holidays are full of divine ice cream shops, patisseries and puddings – don’t cut them out completely but they need to be treats. My poor chubby (I prefer that to fatty) liver doesn’t need another challenge while it’s focussing on trying to repair 35 years of damage.
- Believe you can do it. I’m the child of parents with alcohol use disorder whose lives ended earlier than they might have done because of alcohol. It’s taken me til nearly 60 years old to determine this is not my destiny. An alcohol-free ‘cheers’ to my future adventures.
