Are We There Yet?

My holiday only starts when I reach my hotel room or self catering apartment or hostel room. My family get excited about the holiday as soon as they get to the airport. I genuinely can’t understand why. The whole process is impersonal, built on suspicion and designed to make you feel as little like a human being as possible. Then you have the flight itself which for me is purgatory. There’s no leg room to speak of, although the budget carrier I flew from Paris to Madrid took the biscuit for that. I christened it Douglas Bader airlines 🤣🤣. Even if leg room is reasonably good for these days, the flight itself is 20 minutes of nerves sandwiching however many hours of boredom! Then you get to the other end, go through baggage claim, passport control and drag or carry a case onto whatever transport you are taking at the other end. It’s a pretty dire experience as far as I am concerned!

When I am in the middle of a holiday, a trip to another destination just takes me out of the holiday mood and it’s like starting the rigmarole all over again. If I have the time, the train is an OK option. Unlike flying, you can stretch your legs a bit, open a window and take in the scenery. We did that in both New Zealand and Australia and I enjoyed it more than flying, but it’s usually much more expensive and far more time consuming. So, on the odd occasion we have had a two centre holiday it’s been the flight. When we went from Sydney to Port Stephens back in 2024 we flew there but we had the fantastic drive along the coast from Cairns to Port Stephens. One side was the sea and the other side was rain forest. I loved every minute and really drank in the experience. It was a taxi so Janet didn’t have to drive and could also really appreciate it. As a final bonus, the woman driving the taxi had a fantastic playlist which I recreated on Spotify and which you can find below. Happy listening and safe travels.