Today is my birthday and as I’m leaving a decade behind, I thought I’d reflect on everything I’ve learned about travel and adventures during the last one.
1: Glamping is fun
I never thought I’d be a glamping fan. I camp. Where’s the sense in spending more money on a shepherd’s hut or tree tent than on a hotel room to live like I’m camping? Because, it turns out, it’s fun and it’s also a nice break from life.
2: Tbilisi is amazing
Tbilisi was on my to-do-maybe-one-day list but Traverse 24 dragged it into my to-do-in-January-2024 list and I really liked it. It looked interesting and it was, but it also had endless natural hot water, an interesting mix of ancient, old and modern and an amazing cheesy bread-based national dish.
3: Hand luggage only is perfectly simple
It feels like only five minutes ago that I gave up on hold luggage when it just became implausibly expensive. Since then, I seem to have mastered hand luggage only, while remaining a hideous overpacker. I’ve had moments of “I can’t do Iceland in winter with all those layers without a suitcase!!” but it turns out, every single time, I can.
4: I can do a few days out of a personal item
On a similar note, if I need to because I’m jumping on a really budget airline, I can do a few days with a personal item only. I don’t love it and I will almost always choose to pay the extra for a proper size bag to put in the overhead locker, but if necessary, I can do personal item only.
5: I have no problem with 24 hour darkness
Or rather, I should say, for a few days. I have no idea whether I could cope with it for an entire winter, let alone several winters. It’s a novelty. It gives me the opportunity to look for Northern Lights and see the world under a literal different light and it also means I don’t need to put on my sunglasses to go outside. I may be a polar bear but I’m also a vampire.
6: I’m not much of a hiker
I thought at one point that I was. I’m competent with a map and compass – yes, not a navigation app! – and I’m reasonably comfortable to walk 10km in a day, up to 16km if I have to, which means I can hike out to visit volcanoes and so on. But I’m never going to climb mountains or walk long distance trails and that’s fine. It’s not my thing and I now realise it.
7: Put your tent pegs away before driving down rutted roads
I’ve fallen for this a few times. I’m in Iceland, I haul the tent down, I throw the fabric in the back seat to dry rather than roll it up and put it away, I dump the pegs and poles on the back parcel shelf and then I drive down a road with a washboard-like texture and the things tinkle away for a solid hour. This is something I haven’t learned terribly well because I’m more lazy with these things than I am packed with forethought.
8: Put sun cream on the back of your hands
I’m good at doing arms and legs and face, ears, back of neck, toes occasionally. I know which spots I miss and I make extra effort to cover them. But I do tend to miss the back of my hands and if I’m paddling, with the back of my hands facing the sky, they get burnt. So that’s something to remember, to put sun cream on them.
9: Actually, I can snowshoe
I went on a trip shortly before my 30s began when I fell over the snowshoes constantly, knocked them off my own feet and generally concluded that snowshoeing is not my thing. But actually, I can do it. Sometimes you need to try something a second time or take it more gently or figure out a way to do it that works for you instead of assuming you can’t do it at all.
10: As long as my sister is around, I will never get the double bed
Oh, this one annoys me. In 2018, we went on a family trip to Cyprus. Three bedrooms, two double and one single. My parents got one double and then my sister got the other double “because she’s used to it”, as if double beds are something you have to get used to. It was the same when we went Eurocamping together – a two bedroom caravan meant for a nuclear family of two parents and 2.4 children. Luckily, I do most of my travel solo and I can have whatever bed is available.
11: I like to swim in new pools
I’ve been swimming since I was a literal baby. I had swimming lessons up until I was eleven or so and I sometimes remember that I quite like swimming. And what I’ve learned, especially in the last few years, is that one of my travel joys is going to new pools and enjoying a swim. I like them warm, I like them outside, I like them on cold drizzly evenings when I’d otherwise be sitting around staring at my watch and I don’t think I’ve ever regretted taking a drybag of swimwear and travel towel with me.
12: Tromsø is a good place to see the Northern Lights
One thing I’ve learned over many years is that the Northern Lights are hugely capricious and there’s never, ever any guarantee of seeing them. That said, I’ve found Tromsø has been infinitely more reliable than anywhere else across northern Europe for seeing something worth seeing. It’s entirely anecdotal and entirely down to dumb luck but that’s what I’ve experienced.
13: I can’t throw a lasso
I will never be a cowgirl, or live a nomadic life herding reindeer because try as I might, I simply cannot throw a loop of rope with any accuracy at all. This extends to quoits. Just can’t do it. Give me a bow and arrow, give me a sword but a lasso, nope.
14: Amsterdam isn’t really somewhere I enjoy
I mean, maybe it’s somewhere that would improve on a second try but maybe you can’t love everywhere in the world and Amsterdam is that for me. I don’t dislike it, exactly, but I found its mix of the low brow (coffee shops, red light district) and high brow (art galleries full of old masters) just didn’t work for the kind of thing I like to see and do.
15: Poland is pretty
It’s also quite disturbing once you realise that a lot of the stuff that is pretty was reconstructed after getting bombed almost out of existence in WWII. But Poland is pretty. After my first trip there, to Gdansk, I declared that I’d like to do a big train trip and visit lots of other cities and I did that last summer. I still have lots of places left to visit.
16: It’s worth spending a bit more on hotels in Paris
I have stayed in some places, especially in Paris, where my mum wouldn’t walk past it on the street, let along go inside. I have been boiled, frozen, kept awake by horrible noises and appalling smells and brought back diseases that needed to be treated with antibiotics. I will never be spending on the 5* hotels with views of the Eiffel Tower but it’s worth taking a step up from the flea-infested places within walking distance of Gare du Nord.
17: Cyrillic isn’t so intimidating
I have a background in modern foreign languages – French & Spanish with a good splattering of tourist German from years of family holidays in Austria plus my obligatory year abroad in Switzerland. I’ve learned a little Norwegian and a very little Finnish. I have a little collection of Icelandic nouns. All languages using the Latin alphabet. I wanted to learn Russian for years and I put it off because there’s an entire Art Deco-inspired alphabet disguising it. I now have a handful of Russian and Ukrainian words and phrases but more importantly, I can decipher Cyrillic – albeit like a toddler spelling out C-A-T – and actually, it’s neither so difficult, nor so intimidating, as long as you remember that it’s full of “faux amis”, letters with a superficial similarity to Latin ones that are actually totally different.
18: Christmas markets are a joyous mound of lights and fat things
I didn’t think I was a Christmas market person but the combination of Christmas lights, mugs of hot chocolate and gluhwein and the sheer variety of interesting fried foods make them things of joy. I don’t need to go off and do a long weekend of Christmas markets every year but I do enjoy them when I do go to them.
19: I actually can cope with a certain amount of heat
I know, I’m a polar bear and have been for more than a decade – so, since shortly before my 30s began! I knew back then that I’m not a big fan of heat. It’s why I go to Scandinavia rather than the Caribbean. But actually, done correctly and carefully and in my own time, I can cope with some heat. I went to Dubrovnik in May! I melted my way around Poland and I survived Cyprus, albeit in January. I will never love the heat. I will never want to go somewhere tropical and spend a month on the beach in a bikini but I don’t need to retreat to the Arctic to escape anything over zero degrees.
20: I need to visit more cathedrals
My love affair with cathedrals – or more accurately, with Gothic, Norman and hybrid Gothic-Norman cathedrals – began with Iceland, with Olafur Tryggvason, with the Viking invasion, with Æthelred the Unready and with Winchester. Gradually I’ve come to realise that I love cathedrals and stained glass as a form of art. Not religion – I remain a staunch non-believer and non-want-to-believer but I love the architecture, the decoration, the colours. Then Notre Dame caught fire and I realised that I may not necessarily have the time to assume “I’ll get around to visiting them all” in my lifetime. That said, after a brief initial spurt of energy, I’ve let that slide pretty badly.
21: The Trans-Siberian Express is really slow
A lot of so-called express trains are slow. Switzerland’s Glacier Express has been called the slowest express train in the world. The Trans-Siberian is another really slow express. I took it from Ekaterinburg to Perm in 2019. Two stops, 230-ish miles, and it took just over seven hours which I think works out at around 32mph. Not exactly walking pace but still very slow for a train.
22: You do need to take an actual coat in winter
I can think of two or three trips I’ve done, generally around November, where for various reasons, I haven’t bothered to take a coat with me. I have a heavy fleece-lined shacket-thing which I took to Gdansk – the Baltic! In November! in a shacket! – and I nearly froze and although I’m sure I wore a ski jacket, I remember being very cold in Amsterdam too. You’d think a polar bear would be on top of all things cold weather-related but sometimes I really need to remind myself when I need a proper coat.
23: Hot tubs take a certain amount of logs, not a certain amount of time, to heat up
I learned this one slowly but I learned it well. Depending on the size of the hot tub and how cold it is when it starts off, it takes 4-8 logs to heat that water. You can put one in at a time and add the next one as soon as the last one is starting to finish up or you can cram the burner full of as many logs as it’ll hold and it’ll release the same amount of energy overall, whether it’s in half an hour or three hours. On the other hand, doing that means there’s nothing you can do when you’ve overdone it and the hot tub hits 50°…
24: Volcanoes are much redder than they look in photos
In the summer of 2022, I hiked out to the live Meradalir eruption. It was a comically tiny eruption, actually, but the one thing that struck me was that the lava, both the kind bubbling away in the middle of the crater and the kind being sprayed into the air, was a really weird bright glowing shade of neon dark reddish-orange. In photos, it’s between bright orange and yellow but the reality is almost red.
25: Train adventures are fun but they’re really tiring
With a limited amount of holiday time, I don’t have the luxury of going all-out for slow travel but I’ve done a few interrail-like trips in the last year – London to Warsaw in eight days via Berlin, Poznań, Wrocław and Łódź last summer and Stuttgart to Frankfurt in six days via Baden-Baden, Bad Kissingen and Bad Ems with a minor deviation to Koblenz back in February. Those were fun but they’re also really tiring, which is partly because you have to carry your own luggage all day every day and partly because I didn’t necessarily allow myself enough time between trains, either to explore or to transfer.
26: I really like hot water
I think I was 25 or thereabouts when I went to my first spa. I liked it but I didn’t love it. I was 26 when I first went to the Blue Lagoon and I did love it. But I don’t think I really fell for hot water until a bit later. When did I first go to other geothermal pools in Iceland? Fontana must have been 2013, Myvatn 2015 and I think it must have been sometime since then, since my 30th birthday in the Nature Baths, that I’ve gone from enjoying hot water to loving it enough to write a book about it.
27: I like making scrapbooks
I’m still reconciling my non-artistic side with the discovery that there’s more to art than being good at drawing or at painting portraits. One thing I like to do is make scrapbooks of my trip. I’m currently working on a fairly massive one that incorporates my trips to Budapest and Germany as evidence for my Trefoil Guild Gold Voyage Award but I’ll often make small ones of individual trips, consisting of all the scraps and receipts stuck into little “scrapbooks on the road” as I go along. Someone, with a smug look on their face, once called this “clutter” but I like the idea of every trip having its own little book that one day will fill an entire bookcase.
28: I don’t mind swimming in the sea but I’ll never love it
While I like swimming in pools and in geothermal things, I’m not a fan of swimming in the open sea. It’s cold and it has creatures and it’s just not my thing. I like kayaking and canoeing and things that keep me above the water but in my quest to get qualified in kayaking, I’ve had to get used to sea swimming and… I don’t hate it. I voluntarily went off on a bus to find a suitable beach for swimming off Dubrovnik’s port last year and I’ve been in the sea – ok, usually in a sea pool, but in my defence, the sea is usually a lot less scary than sea pools – in Devon and Cornwall, plus at home, where I know and trust the shallow, sheltered sea.
29: I quite like planning things a bit in advance
A few years ago, I’d have said that my favourite kind of travel is the sudden spontaneous stuff, where you realise you’ve got a few days free the week after next and you pick somewhere and just go. I do get impatient when I book a trip months ahead and I’ve been thinking about it for ages and I’ve still got ages to wait… but there’s a certain amount of fun in having lots of time to make and change plans and do a bit of research and know what you’re expecting rather than everything being a surprise.
30: If the travel came to an end tomorrow, I’d probably be ok with that
I’ve always known that this can’t go on forever. One day I’ll have a mortgage or commitments or be too infirm to keep going. There will always be things I want to do and places I want to see and I’ll never, ever be entirely satisfied but on the other hand, I’ve ticked off a lot of my to-do list and if tomorrow is the day when I never leave home again, I think I’d be ok with that. I was ok with it in 2020, when the prospect of the world going back to normal looked impossible. That said, I hope we don’t have a rerun of 2020 and I hope that day is still a long way off.
I Am A Polar Bear 