Most families return from vacation with photographs and great memories.


While we certainly also took these with us from a trip to London (and an extra suitcase to accommodate the oldest daughter’s Waterstones book haul), we apparently also returned with a whole chapter for our book.


“To Travel is to Live”

… is a quote from one of our great Danish writers: Hans Christian Andersen who wrote famous stories like “The Little Mermaid,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” (And yes, “our”, as this family hails from the lovely country of Denmark.)


H.C. Andersen, if anyone, embodied the concept of gathering inspiration for his writing while traveling.


And we’ve experienced the exact same thing. (No comparison otherwise to his work and ours. We might be susceptible to delusions of grandeur, but there are limits.)


One of the wonderful things about travel is that it exposes you to new stories. History suddenly becomes real when you're standing in front of it. And a city becomes something entirely different when you walk through its streets instead of simply seeing it on TV.


Travel has therefore always been a big source of inspiration for our three-leaf family clover. Not because we spend our vacations sitting around discussing literature or plotting future novels. Quite the opposite.


We travel to experience things together. To see new places… To learn new things… And to laugh. Then, at some point, all those experiences started finding their way into the book.


And no city has inspired us more than London.


About Our Book: “The Stories of Smirtz”

Perhaps, before diving deeper into how that came to be, we should quickly set the scene around the book we’ve written and who we are.


Our book is called “The Stories of Smirtz” and is written by two daughters (aged 12 and 15) and their dad. It’s about a boy called “Smirtz” who, along with his friends, always ends up in a lot of trouble, despite having nothing but good intentions.

  • You can read more about the book itself and the crazy characters here: What is The Stories of Smirtz about.
  • You can find the sample chapter and Table Of Contents here: Sample Chapter. (In the sample chapter, Smirtz visits a gym which also leads to chaos and mayhem when he meets a fitness influencer, a big bodybuilder, and a divorced lifestyle coach who’s taken up spinning and loves Lycra. And we included the Table of Contents, as the chapter headings and the subheadings within each chapter give you a pretty good idea of the book’s unhinged humor.)
  • If you want, you can read about “us” (the three authors) and our book writing journey here: About the Authors of Smirtz and contact us here: Contact Us.


How a Trip to London Inspired a Whole Chapter in Our Book

We’ve visited London twice.


On our first trip, we explored many of the city's iconic landmarks: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the London Eye.


For more information about these monuments (and more) and wonderful pictures of these, we recommend these articles:


We also visited Waterstones (the largest bookstore in Europe), which to the oldest daughter is “Home away from home.” (See: The Waterstones Blog | Waterstones)


During our second trip, we spent more time simply enjoying the city itself with shopping (Waterstones again!) and seeing the musical “Hamilton.” Its storytelling, music, energy, and humor became something we kept returning to long after we got home. In fact, the soundtrack became a frequent companion while we worked on the book. (If you haven’t seen it and you get the chance, we highly recommend it: Hamilton Tickets | Victoria Palace Theatre | London Theatre)


But it was during the first trip, seeing the iconic landmarks, that we found so much inspiration for our book that it actually ended up defining an entire chapter dedicated to this wonderful city.


More specifically, it was the experiences of seeing:

  • Big Ben,
  • The London Eye, and
  • Buckingham Palace

that found their way into our book.


In fact, the idea for what happens at the London Eye came while we were in one of the ride’s capsules. Something we also described in the “Preface” of the book:


“During the writing process, which often took place on weekends and during holidays, the original bedtime stories were also considerably expanded based on spur-of-the-moment inspiration. One such example came during a vacation to London.

While viewing the beautiful city from the London Eye, the youngest daughter noted: “Wouldn’t it be fun if this Ferris wheel had a setting called Mega-hyper speed?” And just like that, a new section for a Smirtz story was born, and notes were immediately jotted down.”


And so, during this school trip to London, Smirtz and his friends get into a lot of trouble (some would likely call it “chaos” and “mayhem”) when visiting these three distinct landmarks. (Honorable mentions also go to the legendary toy store “Hamleys” – the oldest toy store in the world, see Hamleys - Wikipedia – which is also indirectly mentioned in the chapter.)


The Class’s Teacher Erling Makes a Memorable First-Appearance in the London Chapter

The London chapter is also particularly special to us because it marks the first appearance of one of our favorite characters … the children’s lovable but also very eccentric teacher … Erling. Or more specifically: “Erling Alfa Beowulf,” as he often prefers.


Erling believes he’s 50% teacher and 50% heroic knight (and 100% delusional), and his way of dealing with chaos is to fully embrace his knightly role-playing alter ego and charge heroically into the situation. (Whether the situation actually requires a knight is often another question.)


Let's just say that combining him with Smirtz and his classmates … in London … produces exactly the level of mayhem you would expect … perhaps even more.

(You can read more about Erling in this blog post: “Calling all Nerdy Parents”.)


Get the “Smirtz in London” Chapter Sent to You: Completely Free

Now … We’ve written a lot about this London chapter here in this post. But “talk is cheap” (or in this case: “writing is cheap”), and we would love to show you what all the “fuss” is about.

So, how about reading that chapter yourself?

You see, apart from the sample chapter that we mentioned earlier, you can actually also read one more chapter from the book. If you sign up to our email list, we’ll send you updates on the book and ANOTHER free sample chapter. And that chapter we’ll send you is… you guessed it: “Smirtz in London.”


You can sign up here: Sign up for another free sample chapter.


Downtime During Vacations Allows You to Focus

Now, it’s not “all work and no play” when we go on vacations. In fact, we never plan to do any work while on holiday. Yet, it sometimes comes naturally when abroad.


Either as “spur-of-the-moment inspiration” (as it did at the London Eye), but also when we find ourselves relaxing in the hotel room after a long day of sightseeing. Then, we suddenly decide to pull out drafts of our book and discuss and fine-tune them, as these pictures show we did during our trip to Rome in 2025.


Also, upon returning to our hotel in London after a day that included a multi-hour trip to the big Waterstones bookstore, the combined haul inspired us to discuss how to progress in certain parts of the book where we had hit a mental roadblock.


However, we read some chapters from some of the books together that we had bought and suddenly inspiration to solve these mental barriers was found. (We’ve written a blog post on reading together as a family which can be seen here: “The Stories of Smirtz”: The Perfect Book for Family Reading Time or a Family Book Club.”


One of the authors whose books we bought that day was Karen Blixen, another renowned Danish author, who – like H.C. Andersen and Ernest Hemingway – used travel as fuel for her book writing. Her famous books: “Out of Africa” and “Babette’s Feast” are testaments to that.


For children especially, travel can spark curiosity and imagination in ways that are difficult to recreate elsewhere.


You can read more about the positive impacts of travel here:


Looking back, we can clearly see how many of our own experiences eventually found their way into “The Stories of Smirtz.”


We hope you want to explore our book, and the universe around it, on this website and by reading the sample chapter linked below.


Many thanks for reading this post.


Bye!


About This Blog

This blog is written by the family behind The Stories of Smirtz: a funny family-written book created by two daughters and their dad.

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