Ahead of me, as Vanessa falls quiet, Natalie and Hugh begin to chat, their heads bending towards each other. Derek is busy taking pictures of the birds and the trees.

Pippa sees what I’m looking at and takes immediate action, elbowing her way past Andrew and Derek until she wedges herself in between Natalie and Hugh.

‘Natalie,’ she says loudly, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about Texas, everyone in England is dying to go there.’

I remain at the back of the pack, lost in thought. I’m grateful to plod through the trees alone.

The wooden path winds around a corner and takes us deeper into a mangrove swamp. The giant exposed roots and dark water, so markedly different from the sparkling turquoise of the ocean, look exactly like the mangrove swamps of the Florida Keys.

I’ve only been there once – I was thirteen and Millie was fourteen and our parents agreed, after months of begging, to take us to Key Largo for spring break. That year, our trip to Florida was one of the only things we could agree on. We had grown apart since Millie started high school. She had new friends and liked boys whose names I had never heard of. I followed her around when she came home from school and desperately tried to hang out with her friends, usually only able to stick around for five minutes before Millie kicked me out, closing her bedroom door with a heavy seriousness because she and her friends needed to ‘talk about stuff’.

But as soon as our parents agreed to the trip, Millie and I got closer. I still wasn’t allowed to hang out with her and her friends, but something about me became interesting again. Key Largo was all we could talk about – Millie had just broken her arm playing soccer and even her injury couldn’t dampen our excitement.

It was the first time Millie and I had ever been to Florida. Usually, our family drove two hours to Cleveland and rented a little cottage on Lake Erie for spring break – it was always freezing. But that year we got to drive twenty hours to see alligators and snorkel in the great blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

On our drive down we stopped at an Everglades National Park outpost where you could hike through the mangroves, go kayaking, and even go cliff jumping near man-made waterfalls. We traipsed our way through the humid jungle, working up a sweat before we arrived at a series of small pools borne from an arrangement of large, exposed rocks. There was a clear pathway up to the top, where there was about a twenty-foot drop into the deepest pool. Our parents went to the kayak stand to confirm our rental, and Millie and I loitered near the edge of the water.