A few months after my Grandmother passed away I got a letter from a law firm with a cheque enclosed. Yogi, as she was affectionately known in our family, had left her five grandchildren a small inheritance. This left me with a quandary I hadn’t expected; How can I make this gift really mean something.

Doris Bradley, aka Yogi.As I stood in my kitchen holding the letter printed on the kind of high grade paper you would expect a law firm to use, I felt a little strange looking at the cheque, almost uncomfortable, as if somehow I had cashed in my grandmother for a little bit of loot. Yogi wasn’t a rich lady by any means so it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that there might be even a small inheritance.

Make no mistake, I was not in the least bit ungrateful, just unsure as to what to do with this money. If I banked the cheque I knew it would just be swallowed up in the benign expenditure of day to day life, and I didn’t want my Grandmothers money to bleed away paying some boring bill or a portion of my monthly rent. I wanted to do something special with this money, something that she might have done herself, but what?

It then occurred to me that Yogi had always enjoyed hearing about my travels. The postcards that I sent her from various locations around the world were always on the wall when I visited her. Despite my asking she wasn’t one for telling her own stories, but she always seemed to enjoy mine, asking me how long it would take to get to this place or that, and what I had done while I was there. It seemed to me that Yogi enjoyed my wandering ways so I had the perfect idea of what to do with her final gift. I would travel.

Thanks to the emergence of low cost airlines the money she had left could go long way if spent wisely. So I purchased a pre-paid MasterCard and reserved it solely for the purpose of buying flights to places I’d never seen before.

Pretty soon I had booked two trips. First would be a weekend in Oslo, followed not long afterward with a trip to Italy, and all for the grand total of a little less that £40!

I was of course delighted at the bargain tickets, but also pleased that while she’s no longer around to send postcards to, Yogi gets to be a part of these trips, and at the price of these tickets I suspect she might be a part of quite a few more to come too.

Thanks Yogi!