Travel advice

For an aging grandparent travelling alone to visit offspring on the other side of the world, there is only one piece of advice worth heeding (and it isn’t to be found on the official travel advisory sites). That advice is that:

whatever happens, you are never to panic.

Don’t panic, even if, on emerging from the stifling 2 hour torture of immigration processing in the Heathrow cattle-pens, you don’t recognise the long-haired, part-bearded Rasputin-look–alike, who says he’s your son.

He will be.

Don’t panic, even if, having successfully negotiated the train trip from Euston to the correct Birmingham station, you cannot find your daughter-in-law and grandchildren at the designated meeting-point and you cannot find a public phone and when you do, you cannot get it to work, and when it does, you find that your family are only a few metres away, but you still can’t find them.

Eventually you will.


 Even if, because of a sick mum, you are entrusted with the task of taking your 9 and 7 year old grandchildren on the train one stop further on to another town for shopping and you don’t feel confident about this, don’t panic. Your grandchildren will instruct you on the need first to put money in a machine –it doesn’t matter how much money you put in they say—and then they will get you onto the platform, the right train and to the ticket-seller at the other end to extract from you the fare--minus the money you put in the permit-machine and they will then navigate you all round this strange town—including to the best toilets—and back home again.

Your grandchildren will always know more than you about this and other matters.

And even if you’re confronted by the straightforward task of taking said grandchildren by yourself from their close-by train station on the train direct to London—accompanied by three trolley-cases, two shoulder-bags and your own luggage and you feel a trifle daunted, don’t panic just yet for

it will only get worse, much worse.

There are problems with the trains. It is Saturday, you see. The other grandparents will rise to the occasion and drive you a considerable distance to Birmingham International station, for surely trains will run from there. But, no, it will be necessary to get a special bus to Rugby (wherever that may be) and then sprint across a platform with said grandchildren to the Euston train ----once you find it and after having first unloaded said luggage from the entrails of the bus of course.

All of which is eventually accomplished even though for much of the time you have no idea of where you are.

But don’t panic for this will prove to be the case most days.

However, even when a global grandparent takes all possible precautions, it is hard not to panic, when, after enduring a two-hour taxi drive to get from London to Gatwick Airport, a four hour flight to Crete, a further hour trying to find luggage as a result of amazing disorganization by the Greek authorities, you then expect a bus-transfer to your apartment, but are taken instead by taxi to your complex and then left there ---at 5 AM and there is absolutely nobody of any description to let you into your apartment!

Ever tried ringing a travel agent at 5AM on a Greek mobile network? Or found a way of amusing young children, who had set out from home 12 hours earlier, needed to sleep and now had to be supervised away from swimming pools, play equipment, craggy beach paths and so on in over 25C and darkness for an indeterminate amount of time?

Even if you overcome a tendency towards panic after eventually getting into your rooms around 8 am, it is still hard for a global grandparent not to feel some tremor of anxiety a few days later, when you are rung from England to tell you of a critical terrorist alert in London, the cancellation of flights and details of a barbaric plot to bomb airlines.

Will you get out of Crete or not?

And yet it is not terrorism that very nearly causes a severe panic attack, but incompetence on the part of a travel agent. You get to the airport around 2AM to check in for your 4.30AM flight home. However, you are not allowed to check in nor to have seats allocated, despite having valid tickets with the same airline that took you to Crete on the same holiday package, as your names are not on the all-important-passenger-list! You are told that you must wait until everyone else has checked in and only then MIGHT you get on the plane. It is hot; there are no facilities for the children, who sleep all over you while you just wait for over 200 people to be allocated seats in a painfully slow system.How you long for the internet check-ins and Aussie efficiency that got you to the other side of the world in the first place!

And after you finally get on the plane and then complete your 4 hour flight you must prepare for the realization that getting through Passport Control during terrorist scares and then across London might not be the breeze you expected it to be, compared with getting out of Crete. You are right, for even after surviving somehow endless security processes at the airport, you can’t avoid finishing off your 8 hour journey with a long walk, because the Underground services are interrupted for maintenance, it being Saturday, of course.