We’ve booked our holiday for next year and it’s going to be full of amazing sights.

We enjoyed visiting volcanoes in Italy (Etna and Vesuvius) and Bali (Agung) but the ones that are on our itinerary are going to be even more extraordinary. In fact we’ll see twelve huge volcanoes some of whose names we’ve already memorized: among them Ascraeus, Pavonis and Tharsis Tholus. They are all around 25,000 metres high (that’s over 82,000 feet high or almost three times the height of Mount Everest!)

However, the most extraordinary volcano we’ll see is Olympus Mons, which is to date the highest mountain discovered in our universe at a height of almost 90,000 feet!

Now don’t think we’ll have to do much climbing to reach the top as the slopes of these ‘shield’ volcanoes are very gentle, even more so than Etna so we’ll have special solar-powered vehicles to take us to the summit.

If we are going to reach for the heights then we’re also going for the depths for Mars has some incredible canyons. On our itinerary is the Valles Marineris which is 1850 miles long, a good four times the length of the Grand Canyon which I visited a few years back. Here I am at the bottom of that one.

I promise I’ll post a shot of me at the bottom of this one.

We hope to visit the polar regions and maybe do a spot of toboganing on the extraordinary ice caps there.

There’s also included a bit of history in our journey as we’ll visit the landing places of past visitors. As for nature there will be a trip to rocks that have some primitive molecular life forms on them.

There’s so much more to see, like the ‘ghost dunes’ in the Hellas basin but we’ll be more than content to witness sunrise over Mons Olympus.

Seeing (in real time) the Falcon 9 lift-off last week plunging into darkest space made us particularly excited to look forwards to our holiday.

My wife has been a fan of galactic entrepreneur Elon Musk, for quite some time.

I’m equally a fan of Claire Elise Bouchet, alias Grimes, Musk’s new partner and very original musician and artist.

Sadly however, these fantasies regarding our next holiday may mean that the nearest we’ll get to space travel is the non-passenger experience on our Piccadilly line tube train. a couple of days ago…plenty of space there!

But wait…haven’t I been to Mars before? No, it was Mongolia back in 2008 and a real dead ringer if there ever was one!