Reader story

We had rebooked our anniversary trip twice. In June our daughter asked us to cancel it for good.

By Margaret Ellison · Wellness Review · Reader Story

There are about 1,700 steps across the Amalfi Coast itinerary. We climbed all of them last October. A woman in our tour group told us what she does before every trip, twelve weeks out, and that is why we were the ones waiting at the top.

I’m sixty-eight and my husband Graham is seventy-two. Three years ago we finally booked the trip we’d been promising ourselves since our fortieth anniversary, a week on the Amalfi Coast, paid in full. Then life got in the way. Twice.

The first year we put it off for my mother, who needed us more than a holiday did. The second year it was Graham’s hip, the new one, and the long slow business of getting it working again. Each time we said next year. Each time the deposit rolled over and the trip stayed a photo stuck to the fridge.

In June the final documents came through, and with them the day-by-day itinerary. Activity level three out of four. Steep and uneven underfoot, a great many steps, ‘not suitable for guests with limited mobility’. None of it was news. It had been on the page we booked from, three years earlier. What had changed was us.

Our daughter Claire read it more carefully than either of us had. She went through the week and added up every flight the itinerary mentioned: the climb up from the harbour at Atrani, the steps to Ravello, the ones back up into Positano at the end of the day. About seventeen hundred. She printed it out and left it on the kitchen table with her working in the margin.

She wasn’t being unkind. She was being a daughter who worries. She waited until Graham was out of the room before she said it.

‘Mum, be honest with me. Neither of you can manage the stairs at home without stopping halfway. How are you going to do seventeen hundred?’

The hard part was that she had a point. We’d both got slower without quite admitting it. Graham took the stairs one at a time now. My knees complained more on the way down than the way up. We’d quietly stopped walking down to the harbour and back, the one with the steps, without ever deciding to. That’s how it goes at our age. You shrink your life a little at a time to fit around what stopped being easy.

The message in the group, and the phone call that followed

The operator sets up a WhatsApp group before every departure, thirty-odd strangers who’ll share a coach and a week. Most of it is luggage and what-shoes questions. Then Pauline answered something nobody had actually asked. She’s seventy-one and going for the third time, with her husband Ray.

‘Word of advice from someone who nearly didn’t make it round the first time. If you’re coming as a pair, start twelve weeks out. Both of you, not just whichever one of you is worried about it.’

I messaged her privately, half embarrassed, and it came out more honestly than I meant it to. That we were the couple that line about limited mobility was written for. That our daughter thought we should cancel. That I didn’t know what ‘start twelve weeks out’ even meant. Start what?

She rang me that evening and went straight to the point. Same story as them, three years ago. Ray couldn’t manage their own stairs without a moan about it. She stopped waiting for it to sort itself out, and the pair of them started a collagen drink every morning, twelve weeks before they flew.

She sent me a photo of the tin she keeps by her kettle. Elavate, a collagen you drink, made into a hot chocolate of all things. No tablets to rattle through, no regime, no physio homework. One scoop in warm milk of a morning, the two of them, every day.

‘Why a drink?’ I said. ‘We’ve both taken tablets over the years. Nothing ever came of it.’

‘We never stuck at the tablets either,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole of it. You’ll actually drink this one. Have it with your breakfast and stop thinking about it. Give it the twelve weeks, then try your own stairs. There’s a money-back guarantee, so the worst that happens is you’ve had twelve weeks of hot chocolate.’

I laughed at her. Then I asked how much of it two people get through, because if I was going to do this I wasn’t going to run out in week nine and then blame the drink.

A scoop each, every morning, for twelve weeks, comes to a hundred and sixty-eight scoops between us. A bag is about twenty scoops. Pauline said get the nine-bag box and stop counting, which is what we did that evening, with Graham reading the paper next to me.

The box Pauline told me to get

Elavate Multi Collagen Superblend, chocolate. Nine bags, which is what a scoop each every morning for twelve weeks actually takes.

9 bagsEnough for a scoop each, every morning, for twelve weeks £19.50/bag

Price checked on the Elavate site on 28 September 2026 and may change.

Start your twelve weeks →

90-day money-back guarantee Free UK next-day delivery Made in the UK

Week one

When it was still just a hot chocolate

The bags arrived the next day. I opened the box at the kitchen counter half expecting some complicated routine. There wasn’t one. Foil bags, a scoop inside each, and a card that said one scoop, once a day.

I made two while the kettle was on and handed Graham his. It tastes like a proper hot chocolate, which neither of us expected from something that’s meant to be good for you. Graham said it was the best-tasting thing he’d been told was good for him in years.

I’d braced for the usual palaver. Tablets to count out, something to rub in, a chart on the fridge we’d both ignore by Thursday. None of it. Two hot chocolates, done before the toast was.

By day three he was making them without being asked, which if you knew Graham you’d understand is its own small miracle. Nothing else had changed. My knees were exactly as they’d been the day before. But we were doing something instead of waiting, and after three years of waiting that was not nothing.

Week four

The drawer of things that hadn’t worked

Somewhere in the fourth week I opened the drawer by the sink. The glucosamine, the cod liver oil, the turmeric capsules, a tub of something green that Claire bought us one Christmas. Four of them. Not one finished.

That was when I understood what Pauline had actually been telling me, and it wasn’t about ingredients. We had never given any of them twelve weeks. We’d taken them for a fortnight, felt nothing, and quietly stopped, and then told ourselves that nothing works at our age.

The rest of the advice, over the years, had been rest up, lose a bit of weight, be patient. Useful for plenty of things. Not much use for getting two people up seventeen hundred steps by October.

Week seven

Graham stopped counting

Graham came up our stairs one evening and didn’t stop on the landing. He’d been stopping on that landing for two years, and what annoys me is that I’d stopped noticing he did it at all.

Neither of us made anything of it. You don’t, at our age. You wait and see whether it happens again on the Tuesday.

It did. And the Sunday after that I caught myself wondering, for the first time in a year, whether the two of us might manage the walk down to the harbour again. I didn’t say it out loud.

Week ten

The morning I didn’t see coming

An ordinary Sunday, and the first time in a year we’d gone down to the harbour and back. Same path, same steps, same bench halfway that we used to need. Neither of us had given the hill on the way back a thought.

That’s when we passed a couple we know from the village, coming up behind us, stopping on the landing we used to stop on.

‘What have you two been doing? You went up those like you were thirty. Last summer you’d have been on that bench.’

I laughed, and it caught in my throat for a second. The whole walk had gone by without either of us thinking about it, and we hadn’t even noticed. We’d waited so long for something to change that we nearly walked straight past it.

Then came the question. ‘Go on, what’s your secret?’

‘It’s a collagen drink. Elavate. A scoop each in the morning, made like a hot chocolate. A woman from our trip group put us onto it.’ She had her phone out before I’d finished the sentence. I ended up spelling it for her on the steps.

Last October

Seventeen hundred steps

We went. Graham did the 1,700. So did I. We were slower than the two Dutchmen in the group and quicker than a man of fifty-five who had not, I suspect, given anything twelve weeks.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you a hot chocolate rebuilt my husband’s hip. We’re sixty-eight and seventy-two and we walk like it. What I’ll tell you is that twelve weeks of one small thing, every single morning, together, was the first thing in three years we actually finished. And we went on the trip we’d paid for twice and very nearly cancelled.

Claire came round the week we got back. She didn’t say sorry and I didn’t want her to. She said, ‘Right. What’s next, then?’