By: Victoria

The MAD Blog Awards

I recently travelled over 5,000 miles to attend the MAD Blog Awards in London – the UK’s biggest awards for parent bloggers. Thanks to all of you who voted we made it into the final of the Best Family Travel Blog along with five other family travel bloggers: Five Adventurers, Globalmouse Travels, Jetlag & Mayhem, Mini Travellers and Wild and Grizzly.

With Lori from Wild & Grizzly

With Karen from Mini Travellers and Nichola from Globalmouse Travels

With Nishbah from Five Adventurers

This year more than 350,000 votes were cast for 8,000 blogs and 75 made it to the final. In short, this was a major milestone for globetotting and we were particularly touched to discover what a supportive community we have. Thank you to each and everyone of you who voted for us!

The ceremony was held on 18th September in The Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, London. The evening started with a fizz-fuelled reception followed by a sit down dinner and then the main event, the awards presentation.

The MADs

The MADS, where checking your phone over dinner is encouraged!

To cut to the chase, we didn’t win. But I did have a very good time! The award for best Family Travel Blog went to the well-deserving and lovely Karen at Mini Travellers. It was such a pleasure to meet her, along with the other finalists in our category. These are all travel writers that Katja and I follow and interact with regularly on social media but have never actually met. Such is the life of a blogger!

Having fun with Karen at Mini Travellers – the winner of Best Family Travel blog.

This was the first blogger awards ceremony that I had attended and what I really enjoyed was meeting so many bloggers with such a wide variety of interests and focus. Case in point, Amy, a children’s nurse who blogs at 2 Boys 1 Mum about life with her two boys; Samantha – the blogging queen of the North East – from Northeastfamilyfun and Fritha, whose beautiful lifestyle blog, Tigerlilly Quinn is currently Top of the TOTS100 charts.

With Amy and Samantha

I was also lucky enough to sit next to Helen from Actually Mummy at dinner. She won the award for Best Schooldays Blog and was also a finalist in the Outstanding Contribution category. It was only after watching her scoop up her awards that I realised she is considered something of a celebrity in the British blogging world! She also happened to be very lovely and would have bagged the Best Dress award as well if there had been one.

Helen with her award

Two other fantastic family travel bloggers who I was thrilled to finally meet were Ting from My Travel Monkey and Cathy from Mummy Travels.

With Ting and Cathy

Last, and certainly by no means least, I got to meet Nichola, the extraordinarily well-travelled mum behind Globalmouse Travels. Katja and I have been huge fans of her site for a long time and it was really nice to finally meet her in person. Hopefully we’ll be working on a a family travel project together in the very near future – watch this space!

Far right: Nichola from globalmouse

All in all it was a lot of fun and the evening was over far too quickly. Even though we came away empty handed, it gave us a fascinating insight into the world of blogging. No matter how effective social media can be at building relationships, it will (thankfully) never replace a good old-fashioned cocktail party. A huge thank you to Sally and her team @tots100 for organising such a fabulous night and again, to everyone who voted for us.

The end of the evening…