I TOOK MY CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL

Despite a cancer scare, a major earthquake and four children under 13, travelling the world made Sarah Willingham and her family stronger, happier and smarter

- SARAH WILLINGHAM

I've always been naturally nomadic, and if I didn't have to live in a fixed place, I'd spend a lot of time roaming.

Travel is something that I have a physical need to do. It's always been important to me, and I spent much of my twenties in my first two jobs, working in the international departments of Planet Hollywood and Pizza Express, travelling extensively.

Then, as my business career took off and I had four children - and took very little maternity leave - opportunities for real, exploratory travel, not just holidays, got smaller and smaller. I realised that the window of opportunity to really travel was diminishing rapidly.

A SWEET SPOT

Before too long, my oldest child's teenage hormones would kick in and GCSE syllabuses would anchor us to the UK. But with my children between the ages of five and 10, I realised we'd arrived at a sweet spot. The kids would be fine to leave their friends for a year. Twelve months out of formal education wouldn't be damagingly detrimental, so the time was now.

My husband Michael and I decided we were going to take the kids, Minnie, Monti, Nelly, and Marly, out of school to travel the world for a year. But then Dragons' Den arrived.

I decided filming a single series wouldn't work as I'd need two series to establish myself as a Dragon, so we delayed our plans for another year, and by the summer of 2016 we'd downsized our businesses, rented out our home, and were ready to travel.

I wanted only one thing from our trip: to bottle time. If I had one superpower, it would be to press Pause around me, to just take it all in rather than live life in a blur. I wanted to punctuate our lives with something amazing that we'd all remember forever, and that's exactly what happened - although things didn't go exactly to plan.