Memorable days
There is so little time and so much to see!
It was a seminal moment when the friendly lady at the Pension Service at Newcastle informed me that I had worked 48 years and my pension was due to start. It coincided with the sale of our small business. We were free and set to go.
There had been much earlier trips to Australia and South Africa but most of our travelling had been zig zagging across Europe with our children when they were young.
Trailfinders encouraged us both to acquire a BA Amex card. The Avios points and the free Companion Voucher earned, especially from booking trips, enabled two long haul flights a year in excellent lay flat BA Club Class seats for less than travelling ‘bucket and spade’ at the back of the plane.
Where should we go? As many countries and places as possible, preferably without retracing too many steps.
The joy of setting foot on all seven continents was often the unexpected memorable days. The party on the small train going to Machu Picchu, was the start of some stunning days at the lost city in Peru. Standing by the awesome Iguazu Falls on the borders of Argentina and Brazil. The many thousands of seabirds flocking and completely filling the sky behind our boat at the tip of the Aleutian Islands. Watching baby grizzly bears play fighting in the shallow waters of an Alaskan lake just a few feet from our small boat, then moving on to the magnificent sight of tens of thousands of sockeye salmon fighting their way up the river to spawn and die.
Visiting the Serengeti with our entire family and boarding a hot air balloon in the dark to watch the sun rise over a multitude of wildebeest and later with baited breath, to watch them cross a crocodile infested river in their thousands. In contrast, the exquisite silence and stillness of a day spent in viewing an ancient church in a remote part of Greenland and bobbing about on the surface of the Dead Sea in Israel.
There were poignant days too. The Peace Park and museum at Hiroshima are witness to the senselessness of war. The elderly lady who gave her testimony to a silent group of about 20 people, when as an eight-year-old, she innocently watched the bomb drift down on the parachute and somehow survived. She finished by saying that there are 15,000 nuclear bombs in existence that are known and the least powerful is 100 times larger than the one that she lived through. We are so lucky to have lived in our islands without such intrusion in our lifetime.
Then there was the time at the great temples of Angkor Wat and Lucknow, built when our English predecessors were living in simple huts, the amazing rickshaw ride in Varanasi, India that challenged all the senses on the way down to the River Ganges to the witness the evening prayers as have been said there for thousands of years.
South Georgia was special too. With a permanent population of about 4, we were privileged to attend a surprise wedding in the tiny white church. We then traced in reverse Shackleton’s historic escape from the Antarctica to save his crew. And the one favourite place has to be sharing a beach there in Antarctica with 250,000 king penguins.
In all about 65 countries visited, many stories to tell and places to remember, with no regrets.
Graham and Jean
