Travel planning is consuming my weekend – just how I like it! Amazingly, I was able to cancel the whole China trip without recourse to claiming on insurance; with the exception of a £25 per person fee. All Airmiles are now fully refunded and waiting for another day.

So today is the day I’ve been looking at rebooking China. Except, this time of year is really not a great time for visiting China; the reason for Beijing as a destination choice in December was availability of (almost) free Airmiles flights and the ability to spend the time in one place saving the rest of the country for another time. February is our next window of opportunity, and do we really want to spend that in freezing Beijing when other destinations are available. Not really. It also feels too soon – a trip to Beijing will do nothing but remind us of why we didn’t make it there the first time, and it’s all just a bit recent for that.

The Airmiles ‘where can we take you’ map threw up no availability to anywhere worth spending the miles on, and no availability to Beijing either, so that certainly aided the decision making process. Signing off and closing the window, I decided to save the Airmiles for another day and go back to gazing at the map on the study wall and reviewing the bucket list.

Then a random email arrived from Icelandair. We had been prepared to shiver over Christmas in a somewhat chilly Beijing, and Nige secretly wanted to spend the time skiing. So, he might be up for somewhere a little chilly then? The Icelandair email was offering a week’s holiday to Iceland for the same cost as we paid towards our (almost) free Airmiles flights and accommodation. Iceland in late February is out of season. They are (almost) paying us to go. The Northern Lights are (almost) top of my bucket list, and it’s going to be as cold as a ski resort (probably colder).

So, today Beijing has been rebooked. And become Iceland. Where’s my woolly hat and snowboots?