Traveling.
Here is a story of a man who had an terrible holiday: The first thing
that went wrong was that the country we were going to decided to have a
war a few days before we were going there. So that was the end of that.
But the plane we were going on was stopping off at Rome. So rather than
not having a holiday at all, we thought we'd go to Italy. Very nice. See
the sights. Go to the beaches and get fat with pasta. We were at the
airport waiting for the plane and a friend of mine who lived near the
airport had come to see us off. So we were having a few drinks in the bar
and joking with this friend of mine, Peter, saying 'Poor old you in cold
rainy England. This time tomorrow we'll be in Italy on the beach.' And I
went down to see if the flight had been called and discovered it had
gone. It was a terribly stupid mistake. We hadn't checked the time of
departure. I was sure it was going 9 something but it was going at 19
something which of course is 7 o'clock. So we were actually there in the
bar when it went without us. We were determined to have our holiday. The
irony was that Peter was now going back to his comfortable home and we
were stuck in the cold and the rain at 10 o'clock at night. You see, it
was a charter flight so we couldn't book another one. We lost our money
and all the other flights were booked up. Well, we got a train to the
South Coast and caught the midnight boat across the Channel, froze to
death all night, it was a terrible crossing with people being sick
everywhere. And eventually we got to I think it was Dieppe and then a
train to Paris. We got to Paris very early in the morning and I thought
we'd be all right. You see, we now had to hitch hike because a lot of our
money had gone on the boat and the train, but I thought 'Well, it's very
early in the morning, we'll get a good place to start hitching and we'll
soon be well on our way.' We got to the start of the motorway and I just
couldn't believe it. I've never seen so many people trying to hitch a
lift in all my life. Well, it was then it suddenly dawned on me. It was
August the first wasn't it? and on August the first in France the whole
population goes on holiday and there were hundreds of people, stopping
the traffic, banging on drivers' windows trying to persuade them to stop
and give them a lift. It was chaos, disastrous. Well, we got moving
eventually. A lorry driver gave us a lift. And then things started to get
better, as we got further south and it got warmer, you know, and we
thought 'At last, the holiday's beginning.' Well, we camped that night
and we then set off again the next day. We got some lifts, and met a
great chap who owned a vineyard. He took us back to his farm and we
tasted all this wine -Burgundy, my favorite - and we had a great time.
Now the holiday really was starting. Well, he took us back to the
motorway, and there we were by the side of the road, the sun was shining,
we were a bit merry, sang a few songs - you know, life was great. And we
got another lift from ... well he was a maniac, complete maniac. He
seemed nice enough, but within a few minutes he was driving at about a
hundred miles an hour, overtaking on the inside on the motorway, with his
stereo at full volume, one hand on the wheel and well the other hand on
various parts of Susan's body. What! So what did you do? I don't know why
I'm laughing I've never been so frightened in all my life. We were
absolutely -helpless. Susan tried to say that she had to go to the
toilet, but he wouldn't stop then she pretended to be sick in his car,
and he stopped in seconds. He had this really flash expensive car, and as
soon as he stopped we just jumped out and ran. The worst thing was this
tremendous drop from feeling so good to thinking that we were going to
get killed. We eventually got down to the south of France and began to
have a good time, and then down to Italy. We ran out of money, of
course, but apart from that, it was good. I've never had such a tiring
holiday. When we got back, I was exhausted. At the end of the holiday, I
needed a holiday! And this is a story of an old woman. She has traveled
all over the world in her tiny van. It's a nice way of having holiday.
Now at this moment, somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, Olive
Gibbs is probably chugging along the road, in the early morning in her
tiny camping van. The travel bug came to Mrs. Gibbs rather late in life.
About 14 years ago, to help her get over the death of her husband she
went on an overland bus trip to Katmandu. This fired her with the
enthusiasm to travel more, but as she couldn't afford to go on extensive
organized tours, she bought a camper and took to the road alone. Now at
the age of 72, she's clocked up about 75,000 miles on trips that have
taken her to America, Australia and South Africa. Ann Catchpole met her
at her home on the Sussex coast just before she was setting out on her
current venture another wander around America, Canada and Mexico, that'll
take about a year, and she'd been very busy that afternoon packing up the
van, mainly, as she told Ann, with stocks of food. Of all the meals that
I have during the day, my breakfast is the one that I like. It's not that
I have a large breakfast but I do like my toast and marmalade. I've got
quite a few pounds of marmalade in my van at the moment, I should think I
have about 10 pounds, and when that run out and if I'm down in California
by then I shall make some marmalade. I take English things like Marmite
which not many other countries of the world seem to appreciate. I'm also
taking crisp breads to the United States because I don't care for their
bread very much. And I take biscuits because I don't care for their
biscuits very much. But otherwise I can buy everything I need in the
United States. But I don't like wasting my time shopping, so I carry as
much as I can and visit a supermarket only when I'm forced to. Well, I
know vaguely which way I'm going to go, but I do change my direction if
there's something I hear about which I think I would like to see, or I
don't like the road I'll go a completely different way. And at the
beginning of the day I don't know quite where I'm going to sleep at
night. I wait until I feel tired or I wait until I see somewhere that
attracts me and then I stop. The first thing I do, and I do this
deliberately, I make myself a cup of tea, and I sit outside my van
because I think it, it pleases the Americans to see an English lady
having afternoon tea. But as soon as I really ... as soon as I arrive,
especially in the United States or Canada, the men all want to talk to me
about places they've been to when they were in the army during the war
over here. Other people want to know and tell me about where their
ancestors came from, and nearly always I have been to the places, or at
least know something about them, because I do travel quite a bit in my
own country as well as going abroad. In fact when I'm trying to unpack at
the end of a day's journey and get a meal in the evening, life becomes
very difficult because people gather round and want to know all about me
and it's almost dark before I can get on with my unpacking and getting a
meal ready. But I do try to get my cup of tea in first. In Zimbabwe, at
that time called Rhodesia, and I was actually camping in Zimbabwe by the
Zimbabwe ruins. And during the night someone went by with a torch. It
woke me up, and I just thought it was somebody going to a toilet, and I
took no notice. But when I woke up in the morning I found that a lot of
my papers had been taken, and the wallet in which I kept them. And of
course I didn't realize at the time what was going on. It must have been
the noise of the door closing which woke me up. I suppose I'm very
foolish but often I don't lock myself in my van at night. Sometimes I do
if I feel at all nervous or if I'm in a camp site on my own, then I do
lock myself in. Each country has something special about it. But I think
the beauty of South Africa is something that I shall never forget. I used
to stand sometimes when I was there and say to myself, 'Just look and
look as much as you can in case you don't come this way again.
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