Travel is in my Blood

In The Family’s Blood

Travel has been part of my life for many decades now. Travel was in my family’s blood long before me. I have relations in the USA, South Africa, Australia, Bali and all over the UK and Ireland. I can only call myself British because my family is an amalgam of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. My partner is Dutch and I had a sister-in-law who was Serbian. So clearly I am not a quiet stay-at-home who’s family have never left the village. (I still have all my old passports and love looking through them reminiscing about past journeys.)

But neither am I a vagabond, a backpacker, a tourist or a homeless wanderer (despite the fact that I have no home). I am a traveller who calls wherever he is home and who is comfortable anywhere. This stems from the attitude my father had to travel. He had an ease about being in other countries and revelled in immersing himself in other languages. Around the time I was born he went to post-war India to help set up some factories. He spent much of his time learning Hindustani and starting a life-long love of languages. I can’t remember ever seeing him read a novel in English, he always read in other languages. The last language he learnt just before his death was Gaelic, a fine task for a Scotsman, although lowland Scots was more appropriate to him with his love of the poet Robert Burns.

We travelled England and Scotland as a family, always going by car. I enjoyed sitting in the back watching the countryside fly by. I loved trains, I managed to catch the end of the era of steam trains and spent many a happy day watching them swish along the main lines of Britain. This love continues today with memorable journeys across country in India and Australia, as well as the TGV in France in 2009 alone. In my plan for the next couple of years is to return from Australia to Britain overland, journeying as far as possible by train (The Man in Seat 61 is essential for this). My last memorable journey as a child was my six week trip to Yugoslavia when I was 16. I went to visit my brother’s new mother-in-law in Belgrade during the time of Tito, she spoke no English so I had a very interesting time! I travelled there by train, the Orient Express, for two days and never looked back, my travelling days had started.

Travel and Work

I spent the first 15 years of my working life in the theatre, moving from town to town, working in different theatres. It was a bit like running away to the circus but with more creature comforts. I toured Britain end even worked in Canada. I used to travel with an old wicker wardrobe skip to house all my belongings. It was perfect because it could fit through the door of a black cab as well as go on a train. It ensured I didn’t have to travel light!

Ii was in the world of Architectural Lighting Design that my travelling really took off. One of the great things about working on architectural projects is that they tend to be distributed all over the world. My early trips were to Norway and The Netherlands where a number of projects were. Working in a city means you meet local people and tend to treat the place like a local. This gets the tourist out of you, particularly important if you intend to do a lot of travelling. We all know that tourists stick out like sore thumbs, but we still find it hard not to become one. (Hmmm… I think a post on not being a tourist would be appropriate…) Greece became a big area of work for me with numerous trips to Athens. I made many friends there and visited many fabulous restaurants. I found it difficult to get used to their tradition of eating out late at night, I never quite new when the Greeks slept.

Travel as a Volunteer

For around seven years I worked as a volunteer with the IALD (The International Association of Lighting Designers). This organisation was based in Chicago, USA but was a truly international one. For the first three of those years I travelled a number of times to the US to places such as New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, Boulder and Monterey. I always took time out to get to know the city, generally walking around different neighbourhoods rather than sight-seeing as such. I had become interested in Punk Music by then (mainly due to my son’s life as a drummer) and took time to go to live gigs in whatever city I was in. The quality varied dramatically but I got such a kick out of experiencing the world of live, original music. During the latter four years I was Vice-President, President and Past President and my travelling ratcheted up a notch. During the four year period I calculated that I visited the US on average every six weeks. I remember flying into New York for a meeting and flying out again about six hours later, I was out of the Uk for less than a day.

The last few years I have spent as a volunteer with RRI, Tony Robbins Organisation, and spread my travels to Fiji in particular. In 2008 I spent a total of four months there over four visits and I have recently come back from a month long stay there. With this and business travel in lighting I have now visited Australia around eight times and grown to love the place in a strange way. I could never live here permanently, the waiting at the traffic lights would drive me insane and take years off my life.

My Home, the World

This trot down memory lane is not to trumpet my travel life but to show that becoming an Earth Pilgrim comes from a background of travel and enjoyment of other countries. Being part of the local culture is something that comes naturally to me helping me to quickly become absorbed into my surroundings. Wherever I am I could call it home and often do. The world is a home to me and one that I never grow bored with.

(I will come back to this subject, particularly in relation to “Drinking Around the World”! )

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