Who remembers when international travel was a real luxury? A treat to look forward to! You know, when your ticket included a seat for you to actually sit on? And maybe you´d get a nice little sandwich and an iced bun to keep you going, and if you were one of the really lucky ones travelling long haul, then you´d ´ve been tucking into a 3 course meal, scones with jam and clotted cream and no doubt a nice glass or two of wine to wash it all down! And all this included in your ticket price – which maybe you bought in a shop on a high street where somebody actually smiled at you and was paid to work. Well, at the risk of being called an old fart (“Ginger Gerald – your´re an old fart”– did you hear that? I´m being heckled by myself on my own podcast!) –I´d say that they were certainly the halcyon days of international travel weren´t they – when we travelled in style! It was an absolute dream to be heading to the airport knowing you were going to get VIP treatment for a bit – irrespective how much your ticket may or may not have cost. And we´re not talking ancient history here – this is just in the last 20 or 30 years.
Nowadays, even if you travel Business or First Class (and Ginger Gerald´s no expert on that), then you still have to deal with hordes of other travelers trying their best to fight their way through passport control, customs, the shopping mall of an airport, and all manner of additional security checks and paperwork, whilst being shouted at in a dozen languages by the PR system as well as real people employed…well…to shout at you I think. And all that just to ensure you don´t miss your no-seat, no bag, no snack, 6am flight to Alicante! It´s a good job the airport bars are open nice early isn´t it….well, that´s another story!
In all my years of travelling and navigating airports globally, there´s one Security Guard that still sticks in my memory. His name´s Steve and he works in Terminal 3 departures at Manchester Airport. Manchester´s Terminal 3 is depressing enough at the best of times and designed for arguments and pushing and general unpleasanteries, but Steve was the main man for me. This was his speech, which he delivered at top volume to both the assembled masses and to individuals: “have you got anything upon your person” (“upon your person”? What the hell does that even mean?) “Have you got anything upon your person with which you could kill or harm another person”? Well, what a great question that is. In all his years working there (and I reckon he´d been there a fair few) do you reckon anyone ever answered yes? Who in their right mind is going to say “well Steve, if you´ll excuse me, technically, yes, I do have a pencil to do my crossword with and if I actually shoved it straight into someone eye then, yes, I do believe it could harm someone. Oh, and I´ve got in “on my person”! For Christ´s sake.
Maybe I´m exaggerating just a little bit when I say that international travel was all glamour “in the olden days”! The very first time I went abroad I was about 13 – so it was in the late 70´s. Ours was a big family so we didn´t do overseas package holidays when we were kids . Me and my brother who was a couple of years older than me (amazingly, he still is!) we went off to Belgium. Train from Stoke on Trent to London. Walk from Train to Bus station. Then coach and hovercraft from London, via Dover and Calais, to Bruxelles. I can´t remember how long it took to get there – it was a long time – but it was really exciting. And the same on the way back. All went amazingly smoothly in both directions until we finally arrived back at Victoria Coach Station in London. Our Dad had come down to meet us and join us on the final leg back home to Stoke, and he casually checked that we´d still got our passports. The good news is that my brother did have his. Unfortunately, I didn´t have mine! Even after emptying out the entire contents of all of our bags and pockets on the floor somewhere near Victoria Station, I still didn´t have it. So we found a phone box with a yellow pages, we called the National Express Lost Luggage number and they said the coach we´d been on was due back to some depot in North London in the next half an hour. So, me & my bro were sent off on our own by underground to try to find said depot and to retrieve my big old black UK passport - which, amazingly, we did and with passport in hand we headed back into Central London to find my Dad, who many hours later, was still in exactly the same spot where we´d left him, eating a few plums and a bar of Kendal Mint cake. I don´t think he´d moved one inch since we´d been gone. I can´t actually remember him being angry at me – perhaps he was just too relieved that I´d got my passport back and that we´d returned in one piece. Remember no mobiles, no whatsapp to keep track of progress…… he could have been sat there for a very, very long time. Thinking with my dad cap on now, I´m sure I wouldn´t have sent my kids off on their own, to the back end of beyond. I´d definitely have gone with them – and I´d probably have been angry too. I can only imagine what must have been going through his mind for the hours we were gone.
So why do I mention that memory and that trip? Well the first time I lived abroad was in Paris about 7 years later, and I came and went a lot that year between the UK & France. And always by coach & hovercraft or coach & ferry – whichever was the cheapest. I never flew – I think that would´ve been well out my league pricewise in those days. And of course, just like now but with flights, to get the cheapest prices you had to travel at the most inconvenient times – like Tuesday leaving Plaza Stalingrad in Paris at midnight. If Plaza Stalingrad in the North of Paris means anything to any of you then you probably know what I am about to say next. It is probably the grimmest place in the whole of Paris, it was National Express´s International HQ at the time and I swear I´ve never seen more rats in one single square in my life!
So maybe travel “back then” wasn´t always quite so much of a luxury as I´m making out!
And who remembers the smoking seats at the back of a plane? Now I´ve never been a smoker, and I remember coming home from a long-haul season as a Holiday Rep one year and the only seat available was in the middle of a row in the smoking section. 10 hours of pure luxury I assure you not!
Now I need to remind myself that this pod is about moving and living overseas – so, of course some form of international travel is virtually always on the calendar of a person or family who lives abroad, but of course it´s not exclusive to people living abroad. So what differentiates an International journey for those living abroad, versus one taken by people going on holiday or for business?
One of those differences is emotion. It´s very unlikely that someone going to or returning from holiday or from a business trip will be sobbing non-stop at the airport and on the plane. But someone who has is heading home after they´ve just visited their elderly parents and fears they may never see them again – well, they may well be doing just that. And someone, adult or child, who is just leaving all their friends and family behind to start a new life, somewhere remote and as yet completely unknown, might also be doing just that. It´s very common – next time you´re on a plan play that game and try to spot the International Families versus everyone else on board!
I´ve been putting off telling this particular story for a while, but it feels that now is both the time and the place. For those who have moved internationally before, the following story may be rather too close to home for your liking and may bring back some feelings of stress and anxiety. For those of you who may have to do this sort of journey in the future – then this story may generate some feelings of stress and anxiety. Sorry about that. For the rest of you – just be glad you haven´t or won´t do it!
The most emotional International trip we have ever had was the journey from Cancún to Mallorca in 2014. We´d been living in México for 6 or 7 years when we decided, for a bunch of very valid and logical reasons, that we really needed to be back in Europe. Mallorca was top of our wish list – have a listen to my wide T in the episode “Spilling the T” for a few more details on that – anyway, we were eventually successful in getting a job in Mallorca and we set the date to move.
The packing. Oh my word – I don´t really consider ourselves hoarders but the number of boxes we managed to fill, despite giving away or selling what felt like virtually everything that was not classed as a personal item, was unbelievable. I´m not sure where it all came from to be honest. Anyway, we sent it all on a week or so ahead of us to Mallorca via Air Cargo and when it finally turned up in Palma de Mallorca, (quite a few weeks later than we expected by the way) the boxes were rather battered, very wet, open and, it seemed, rather light on contents….. the Harry Potter books were definitely not there any more.
Our moving journey actually started 4 days before the flight. Firstly we had to vacate and give our rented house back to its rightful owner and move into a friends house for a few nights with ALL of our worldly possessions – minus the boxes we had sent on. Then, as these friends were due to go away themselves, we then moved into a hotel for our last 2 nights in Cancún. I´ve not mentioned this until now, but we had two dogs at the time too – one a small, relatively well behaved, very pretty cocker spaniel. The other, a young, mad, loveable, medium sized street dog with a wonky back bone and strange tail that looks just like all the other street dogs you´ve probably ever seen. We had both of them since they were tiny puppies so at no point did we ever consider not taking them with us – but, as those of you who´ve moved with pets before will know, that can be a bit stressful too. Not only did they need a European chip inserting and a bunch of other expensive treatments and documents, but, as they couldn´t be in the hotel with us, we had to put them into kennels for the last few days. We bought the right size travel cages for them (although I felt dreadful as they looked so big in their locked-up cages and they clearly didn´t like being in them very much) and then, when it came to travel day, we had to drop them off at the airport really early and I can just remember them both staring at us as they went down the luggage belt and away into the ether. They were going mad and if they could speak human I hate to think what names they would have been calling us! And we were just desperately hoping they´d survive the journey and we´d see them alive and well at the other end. We´d never done this before. Well that emotional scene rather set the tone for the rest of the day. Suffice to say there were a lot of tears – feelings of real sadness at leaving friends and a life and lifestyle we had got so used to, and real nerves about the unknown life that we were heading to.
The flight itself was in theory going to be the easy bit…Cancun to Madrid, Madrid to Palma de Mallorca with all luggage and two dogs checked in all the way through to Palma. That was double and triple checked before departure from Cancún so no worries whatsoever……. Until, that is, we arrived in Madrid after an uneventful flight and were walking calmly and quietly through the arrivals hall in Madrid and we heard some very familiar barking sounds in the distance. We all glanced over at the same time in the direction of the “extra size luggage arrivals belt” and there were our two cages complete with our two dogs going absolutely beserk. And if the dogs were not going through to Palma, then maybe our luggage wasn´t either – a quick check of the normal luggage arrival belt quickly revealed that we now had our hand luggage, 6 huge suitcases bursting at the seams, plus two very excited, loud and confused dogs in large crates. And, of course, the whole world and his wife watching and shaking their heads in disbelief at the entire scenario …. and we were tired and emotional. A bit of a perfect storm. So when the Air Europa check in staff rather abruptly informed us that we were far too late to check in our dogs for the flight to Palma and assured us that their scales made all of our suitcases considerably heavier than the scales that had been used on departure from Cancún, then I am afraid to say we did rather let them have it. Which prompted them to threaten to kick us off the flight completely – dogs, luggage and the 4 of us too! Oops!
Somehow, and to this day I am still not quite sure how we managed this, but I guess it was partly down to the onward flight being delayed because of a bit of a storm – the airline staff decided they needed to get us out of their airport so suddenly they agreed to waive our excess luggage fees, and said that we could get the dogs, all of our luggage and ourselves onto the flight as long as we ran as fast as we could to get everything done before the gate finally closed. We were the last passengers to board that flight. Emotions were by now very, very raw – surely everything would be fine when we got to Palma?
Well it was a bumpy ride, but everyone and everything arrived and was off loaded successfully in Palma, the dogs got a quick walk and all we needed to do was find our minibus transfer that we´d booked – which we eventually did although he had given us up as a no show some while ago! And the final, final hurdle was to pick up the Estate Agent who´d sourced us a house for the first 2 weeks of our new life in Palma. At midnight that night, after a emotional roller coaster of a journey which seemed to have last almost a week – we had moved. All that was left to do now was to start our new life!!
Folks, I´m drained. Not just because of telling you the story but moreso as it has brought back all of the details and the feelings. The expressions on our kids faces throughout the whole ordeal and the dogs haunting us with their barks!
I can´t carry on anymore – so that´s it for this week folks. I´m not sure how you´ll react to that story, I guess it depends very much if you have or plan to put yourself in our shoes! I reckon there are a bunch of lessons to be gleaned from that little horror story – and I am pretty sure we will do it differently if there is a next time!