Blog Day 136 - Friday 07 August 2020

Welcome to the second Corona Virus free Friday.

As we are unable to travel and unlikely to be able to travel, especially overseas, for the foreseeable future I have been reflecting on some of my overseas trips that I have extremely fortunate to take.

My first overseas trip was in 1986 and I travelled around Europe for 5 months.  Of course travel was very different then, we carried our cash around in the way of travellers cheques, no ATMs of course.  The flight from Melbourne to London was in an earlier model Boeing 747 with stops at Kualar Lumpur, Dubai and Frankfurt on the way.  No internet so no e-mails, skype etc.  We sent postcards that usually got delivered after we had returned home.  We could also send aerogram letters on flimsy blue paper. International phone calls were prohibitively expensive.  I think that I rang home twice in 5 months, usually to arrange transfer of funds to a bank by way of a telegraphic transfer that I then converted to travellers cheques.  I collected mail sent to me from the Postal Restante near Trafalgar Square in London.  No Euro currency in those days so crossing borders meant changing currencies and collecting a lot of small unusable small change on the way.

I did a 3 week Kon Tiki tour around Europe which I still fondly remember (sort of) and was still probably the best three weeks of my life.  I also had a one month British rail pass, a two month Eurorail pass, a European railway timetable and a map of Europe.  

I didn't travel overseas again until 1996 when I travelled to the USA with my friends Jon and Clair.  We had been discussing a trip to the USA but I resisted cause when I went overseas again I wanted to go somewhere 'foreign'.  Well, I found out when I got there that the good ol US of A was every bit as foreign as any other country I had been to.

A number of US trips and a European trip followed with Jon and Clair over a 10 year period.  Technology followed us or we followed technology.  During those ten years ATMs replaced traveller's cheques, GPS devices replaced paper maps, booking on the internet replaced driving into a town and looking for accommodation, laptops and wi-fi started to become common place, mobile phones became easily useable overseas and digital photography made us into photographers who took a lot more photos, not necessarily better photos.

Subsequent trips include attending a wedding in Florida, attending 30th birthday celebrations in Vegas, the legendary European "Battlefields and Burgundy" tour with me old mate Flashy and any number of European trips visiting various battlefields and other place of interest.

Travelling around the TGW Western and Eastern front battlefields has been a great privilege and having the opportunity to visit sites that were influential in my family history, Australia's history and world history were experiences not to be taken for granted. 

There are a number of things that stand out from my travels, the first time you see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the first time you see the lights of Times Square in NYC, the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, the obscenity of the Berlin wall and who can forget their first vision of Las Vegas driving in from the desert.  Another thing that stands out was my upgrade to 1st class with Cathay Pacific on a flight from Hong Kong to Paris, that was a once in a lifetime experience.

I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel and even to this day I get a shiver of excitement when I arrive at an airport packed and ready to get on a plane going somewhere, anywhere.

Tomorrow will be back to the normal blog format with an update on the figures, lets hope that the news will be good news.