The Motivation to travel

I have my Uncle Bob to thank for my love of travel. My Dad died when I was a baby and Bob was my mum’s boyfriend. He had been brought up in a back to back terraced house in Leeds in the 1920s where the toilet was at the end of the street and were cleaned by ‘monster midden men’. He joined the army, spending time in Italy and Egypt during the second World War. He told wonderful stories and tea times were interesting because of him rather than the food.

We had a holiday every year due to my mum’s thrift with her widow’s pension to the north east coast, usually Filey or Whitby. Filey was her favourite and we stayed up to a month in a caravan or a holiday let flat. I always dreamed of going abroad and as soon as I got to university that was what I did, hitching across Europe to Italy and Greece. They were incredibly cheap holidays at a time when you could still sleep on beaches without getting in to trouble. The hitching was not without danger and I recall two sexually perverse incidents. I cringe when I think of all the hitching I did. I doubt they were safer times, but maybe more people were doing it.

In my early married life when the children were babies and money was tight, we went on coach trips to Eastern Europe and the children would sleep under the seats. We saw Gdansk, Warsaw, Prague and Berlin all before the wall came down. The pinnacle of our family holidays was probably a trip to Cuba. The music and dancing on every street corner captured my heart and I thought it was a place I would like to live when I was old.

Once I was a single parent the holidays were less often, but less about compromise. I went to Namibia, Egypt and Thailand. I don’t like going back to the same place. It is never as good as the first time and the world is so big and life is so short.

When I go to bed at night I never try to count sheep. I plot adventures where I am the female heroine, only probably two stone lighter, 90% more volume in the hair, whiter teeth … The hero falls in love with my resourcefulness in the face of adversity, my gentleness, my fantastic intelligence and we live happily ever after. Actually, I’ve gone to sleep long before the happy ever after bit.

In real life I feed my sense of adventure by being open minded in my job criteria, spending all my disposable income on holidays and with lots of incremental planning, trying to create opportunities for myself.

In 2007, as part of a training package, I was offered a career coach (Julia Thrul). We used to meet in the café at the Tate Modern with a great view over the Thames and she got me to verbalise my vision of where I wanted to be in my ‘ideal’ future. I wanted to be working abroad in a hot country, meeting interesting people and having stimulating conversations about world politics. I have to smile as I write this because I did get it, but it wasn’t quite how I imagined it back then.

So that was the seed of how VSO came up on the radar. I certainly did not know anyone personally who had done it before. Why at that time? Why to that place? I don’t see life choices as something you can necessarily control. I see my life as keeping lots and lots of balls in the air and making the choice from the few out of the many balls that don’t come crashing down. My work had been largely contracts for ten years and it was getting increasingly difficult to get new contracts when the old ones had ended. My two oldest children were in that place between late teens and mid twenties when the driver is to break away from parental influence and the youngest had just left for university twenty minutes away from his Dad. I could go away without too many accusations of irresponsibility.

I wanted adventure. Life had been tough and I wanted an out from the financial and emotional responsibility of it all. It was a point in my life where I could have shut my front door and never come back. It was not brave, nor unselfish, but there may have been a touch of idealism in my choice.

I like to bounce my ideas off people in order to fine tune my approach. Over the years I have accumulated a diverse group of friends who are many things I am not which stimulates me. When I can’t see them in person I write to them. I think in descriptive words so writing for me is just an outpouring of what I think about with some punctuation.

This is a story of a real life adventure told in letters, well e-mails really, to the people I love.