Travelling (December 2025)

Another one from the drafts folder!

There was a time (long ago) when I was renown (notorious?) for always having a bundle of airline tickets in my desk.  In fact it was so long ago that these would actually have been those old fashioned multi-part flimsy paper tickets.

Later I moved on to having lots of travel plans in my desk or on my laptop, often with e-ticket numbers (which never felt quite the thing, but did work).  And these travel plans covered pretty much every continent except Africa (realistically I couldn't afford to do Africa and the polar regions). 

Through to my 50s I managed to fit in one or two 'big' trips each years and a range of shorter trips too - limited by the annual leave allocation and funds.  

And I guess that I sort of expected this to carry on once I retired, possibly with the big trips getting longer as the annual leave allocation stopped being a constraint.

But life isn't always so simple.  

First came Climate Change.  I'd not ignored my carbon footprint when I was younger (I'd even bought carbon offsets for trips), but I was struggling to justify the impact of my travel to take more polar bear and penguin pictures.

Then came Covid (just as I was trying to step away from the work desk) which did rather curtail travel for a couple of years.  And the unknown nature of the Covid timescales did make forward planning rather difficult.  What was going to be on the 'red list' in nine months time?

And thirdly (it's always the third one!) along came my Parkinson's diagnosis and threw a whole bundle of unknowns into the mix.  I had no idea how rapidly the symptoms were going to make travelling more challenging.

So where are we now.  

At the moment, logistics anxiety aside, I'm still very happy to put together itineraries for getting between Oxford and Shetland and to figure out train journeys between the UK and Italy.  And the reality is that I'm prepared to consider anything that train-based - with some reservations about the Baltic States while Putin is sabre rattling (and worse) 

Planes? I really not keen to start clocking up air miles again.  

If anyone asks, I'll use the carbon footprint excuse. But, as I discovered recently, there is some Parkinson's anxiety there too.  I'd only really contemplate long haul travel to get back to the far north or far south, and I'm worried about my ability to scramble in to and out of Zodiacs on the beaches and about the extended shore time without access to a loo.