A group of ten Irish lads completed a "trip of a lifetime" to celebrate their 40th birthdays after saving religiously for five years.
Dubbed 2020 Vision, the ten friends put €50 each into a special holiday fund from January 2015 to December 2019, resulting in a massive €30,000 purse to fund a dream holiday.
The group were all due to turn 40 in the space of eight months and decided to forgo any 40th birthday parties and pursue the holiday of a lifetime instead.
And so, on March 2 this year, the group headed to Tampa, Florida, to kickstart their dream holiday, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to grip the world.
Fortunately for them, the pandemic didn't adversely affect their 10-day vacation as Ian Jenkinson told TodayFM.
"There were one or two mentions of 'what if this gets worse', but we just said 'we've waited five years for this, let's just go and see how we get on,'" he told Dermot and Dave on TodayFM.
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Jenkinson explained that the group touched down in Dublin on March 12, the day that then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced the first COVID-19 restrictions in Ireland.
"If we had booked that four or five days later, either we wouldn't have been able to go, or we wouldn't have been able to come back."
Having avoided the threat of COVID-19, the group of ten were free to enjoy the trip of a lifetime.
The trip started in a luxury villa in Tampa, according to Jenkinson, before moving to Florida's Cocoa Beach.
The trip appeared to incorporate absolutely everything, from journeys to the Kennedy Space Center to day trips to Busch Gardens.
The memorable trip ended in Louisiana in the bright lights of the Big Easy - New Orleans.
Jenkinson said that he wanted the publicize the trip so that other groups could plan similar vacations for their own milestone birthdays. He said that the group was already looking ahead to their 50th birthdays in 2030.
The lads documented their travels on Instagram on the account the_2020_vision_, check it out by clicking on the post below.
Read more: Irish lads save up for 5 years for epic birthday vacation to the US
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