The Travel was a Long Time Coming

I always wanted to travel, ever since I was about five years old.

I was really lucky, growing up on the South Coast of England. My parents lived in a house in a place called Lilliput, which is on the outskirts of the town of Poole in Dorset, and right at the end of the famous Sandbanks Peninsula. Those outside of the UK have probably never heard of Sandbanks, but over the last 20 years this has become known as Millionaires Mile, and it's our equivalent of Malibu.

I never realized quite how lucky I was, growing up in a place like this, however what I always wanted to do was to travel. Living in what was pretty much close to paradise, the family used to come and visit us in the summer holidays, and for the other holidays we used to go and visit them. My Mom's family lived (and mostly still do) in Rugby, which is in the Midlands of England, and 150 miles north of where I grew up. Every school holiday we would make the 3-4 hour trek north to Rugby, where I would spend my time playing with my cousins, or more often than not I was B-O-R-E-D.

From an early age, I loved books, and would read anything that was in the house, whether this was our house, or my Grandmothers house, where we stayed when visiting the family. I read a few books here about far away places, including stories like Doctor Dolittle and Treasure Island, and of course I spent hours studying a huge Atlas that we had, as well as maps of Great Britain, but what fascinated me most of all was Picture Postcards.

I was intrigued by all the places that were pictured on these postcards. We had a number of old ones from the 1930's and 1940's and prior, mostly of local places in England, but some from far away, and many more from all over the world, that just amazed me, and I would spend hours studying them, wondering what it would be like to travel to these far off places.

My Nana (Grandmother on my Father's side) had been to South Africa, Egypt, India, Italy and a few other places in the early 1950's, and as well as photographs she had brought back a Viewmaster 3-D viewer with a lot of slides. It was just amazing to travel across the world with these, but I never imagined that one day I would.

Over the years people began to know that I collected postcards, and so the family would always keep these for me, including many from their friends, and friends of friends, until I had a collection of thousands of them. I traveled the world with these marvelous pictures, and yet the real me had never been anywhere.

I tell a lie though. I had been to Northern Ireland, to Belfast when I was five years old, to visit my Uncle, Aunt and Cousins who lived there. Although I did have a good time there with my cousins, the flight traumatized me somewhat, and this fear of flying was to last for many years. We flew over to Dublin, and then on to Belfast, in a DC-3 Dakota, a relic from WWII with twin propellers, and flying low over the Irish Sea my stomach, which was not accustomed to such an experience, since I had never been to the fairground before, took a dislike to it. I was dressed in my best, as parents did for their children when traveling in those days, so I had my grey shorts, school shirt and tie, blazer and peaked cap, and I threw up over the lot. To put it mildly, I was as sick as a parrot! That was the last flying I did until I was 18 years old.

As I said, all my school holidays were either spent down at the beach at Sandbanks, or with the family in Rugby, but in the summer of 1973 the family decided to do something different, and about 10 of us flew out to Majorca, one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean.

Majorca was one of the first destinations for the working class English to visit when overseas travel became popular in the 1970's, and it's still a popular destination, however it rapidly became more like Cancun in Mexico or Cable Beach in The Bahamas are today, lots of hotels with pools, and many visitors rarely venturing outside to see the REAL world.

And so it was with us, as the family spent the best part of 2 weeks sitting around the pool at the hotel, and I never did get to the beach in Majorca. |

This was a time when English people ate Eggs and Bacon for breakfast, drank Ale or Bitter not Lager, and the only fast food you could get was our famous Fish And Chips. Imagine the horror to find that when you went to Spain, you couldn't get "real" beer, the food was "different" (and my family loathed foreign food), and the food in the hotel especially was awful. Most nights after the meal in the hotel, or instead of it, we headed down to a local bar that served Chicken And Chips, and ate that.

Within a few years, however, English entrepreneurs realized that there was a demand for the English way of life, and so the beach resorts all around Spain are now full of English Pub, English Fish and Chips, as well as the later American influx of McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC etc. It's really hard to find a typical meal in any of these places, plus they are full of noisy nightclubs and discos. Not my ideal destination...

And so this was my first experience of traveling overseas, in some ways a good one, but overall the complete opposite of what I would want today.

Oh yes the flight. This was only my second experience of flying, and I was very nervous after my experience when I was 5 years old, and so as was to be expected, flying both to and from Majorca I spent the best part of the flight in the toilet on the plane. Still traumatized unfortunately.

This was my only experience of overseas travel for another 3 years, when I went with 3 friends from University on a 2 week camping trip to Normandy and Brittany.

The French Coast is only 5 hours away by car ferry from Southampton (where I currently live), and so with 2 cars, an Austin Mini and a Ford Anglia, the 4 of us headed off to France.

The trip was quite an experience for me, with learning to drive on the other side of the road, but the scenery in Northern France was wonderful. If you haven't been there, Normandy is where the D-Day invasion took place on 6th June 1944. The countryside is made up of narrow roads, with small towns and villages, and lots of small fishing ports too. It was brilliant and laid back.

We visited Omaha Beach and saw some of the fortifications, headed off to Brittany where we toured Mont Saint Michel, the island with it's Abbey at the end of a causeway, and drove all around the coast of Brittany as far as La Baule, on the north side of the River Loire opposite Saint Nazaire.

We all learned a lot about French food, and had lots of fresh crusty bread, crepes, sausages and salami, and it was just amazing. Everything was so different to England. We also learned a lot about French wine and beer too...

I could go on for hours about the joys of Normandy and Brittany, with their quaint little towns, some still with the ramparts intact and some even with moats around them. It was for me a different world, like something out of the history books.

This is I think where the travel bug in me started, and where I began to learn the joys of appreciating new experiences.

I will halt this chapter of my story here, while I recuperate and move on to the next chapter, which takes me further afield and I have many more adventures.

If you would like to read more about my travels and my growing up in England, you can find an alternative version of my story at Squidoo.