travel

my lust for travel was nurtured early on – each year my father learnt a new european language he would take us on a camping trip around that country. french took two years and our trips once to the north and twice to the south were interrupted to go to my aunt’s wedding in scotland via the lake district.

sometimes it was more than one country morocco was joined to a spanish trip, italy & switzerland to a german trip, later portugal with northern spain.
then one year we drove to moscow via denmark, through the capitals of norway and sweden via finland and finally via leningrad to moscow, (in the former) ussr. the flying visit to leningrad(now st petersburg) was even shorter than oslo & stockholm as we had limited hours to get to moscow before dark – this was in 1964 during the years of the cold war so foreigners (even diplomats) were monitored strictly when outside the capital.

whilst my parents worked in russia for four years i travelled back and forth to england to boarding school, often flying via some european capital for a visit. most of my holiday friends were French, or at least at a french international school, so needless to say i went via paris quite a lot. by now i was truly bitten by the flying bug.

at 18, threatened by having to return to the countryside with my parents when 1970 london was calling me, i went to every airline office at last getting a job in sales. this was the beginning of some very happy years working in airlines which gave me the opportunity of having discounted subject-to-load tickets to fly … well anywhere! there were one or two hitches to this of course – short holiday allowances, rather low pay, with ‘sublo’ tickets, meaning just that, if the flight you chose was full you had to wait for the next and try again. however somehow everything was overcome so travel and the world awaited me.