The first trips and journeys
The first trips I can remember were to Worthing, a city on the south coast of England. Christmas with my grand parents and cousins was a lot of fun, as I seemed to have the capacity to play the fool* and make my cousins, Gillian and Alison, laugh at what I said and did. My mother writes: "I don't suppose you remember how you used to entertain Gillian and Alison by showing off*1 and making them laugh! Everything you said and did sent them into fits*2 which made your granddad irritable! Once grandma gave you an iced cake which you promised to eat. After licking off the icing you handed it back - and said that you didn't want it! And do you remember them giving you money to go on the pier while they played bowls? After half an hour you had lost all your money and landed up at the bowls bored to tears!". I have very fond memories of the time I spent at my grandparents' house in Worthing when I was growing up. I used to enjoy the time I spent at the amusement arcade on the pier, putting pennies in the machines, trying to win more pennies than I put in, that even today, when I go back to Worthing, I'll always try to spend an hour or so on the pier re-living old memories.
When I was very young the family spent a few days in Penzance in the south west of England, Cornwall is a beautiful part of the UK, and there are some special places, like Land's End and St. Michael's Mount.
Another early trip was in 1970, the family went to the Lake District and on a hot sunny day climbed up Skiddaw. This mountain is the third highest in England, and was the first of many mountains I would later scale*3 alone. We then continued north and I visited Scotland for the first time in my life. It rained a lot, but I still have memories of the spectacular landscape of the highlands on the way to the town of Fort William.
In the mid-sixties my parents bought a Volkswagen camping van, and it was in this that the camping bug*4 bit me for the first time. My first trip abroad was in 1969 to Venice in this van, with my parents and sister, Janet, camping in France and passing over the Alps. My memories are hazy as I was only 8 years old at the time, but I can remember a sunny lakeside camp site near Venice, and a trip to glass making factory where we could watch glass objects being blown. I can also remember a winding road across the Alps and walking through the streets of a lakeside city in Switzerland, probably Geneva.
In 1973 we made the last trip abroad in the camping van, spending two weeks in Normandy and Brittany. I don't remember much apart from seeing the Bayeux tapestry, La Rochelle and the mechanical problems with the van in France which led to us needing to enlist*5 help to push the van to get it started!
1976 was a year which profoundly marked my life. Dad was sent to Peru to help the Peruvian navy with a problem. When he came back, the whole family gathered in front of the slide projector and screen to see the photo's he'd taken. I marvelled at the architecture and strange culture and people and at some time in the aftermath*6 of the slide show I took the decision, largely subconsciously, that I too would go to Peru one day. It was this decision which, in the future, would radically change the life of an average*7 fifteen-year-old in a small village in the west of England. It was then that I made up his mind that one day I too would go to this strange and exotic country, perhaps to live there for a while.
* Idiom - definition 2
*1 Phrasal verb
*2 Noun - def. 2
*3 Entry 4 - Verb - def. 1
*4 Noun - def. 5
*5 Verb (transitive) - def. 2
*6 Thesaurus - Noun - def. 2
*7 Adjective - def. 3