Travel as a Dream – Come True

There I was, climbing a cobblestone path up to St. Michael’s Mount, a castle shrouded in Cornwall’s coastal mist. On this soggy day, the castle looked even more ancient and mysterious, and I was eager to reach it, climbing the wet and slick footstones, one careful step after another, to reach the summit. 

The hard stone block exteriors reflected the building’s 1,500-year history as a monastery, then a military outpost, and now, surprisingly, a private residence.

Once inside, it completely transformed to a warm homey space, with modern electrical lighting, finished ceilings, classic rugs, and other effects. Through furnishings, painted portraits, photographs, and artwork, I explored the history of the family that has lived there for nine generations, living each era with them.

Where was I? Just returning home from a trip to London and southern England, I felt like I had lived a three-week dream of places, sights, and people I had never experienced before.

Was it a dream? Yes, in many ways. Travel can be like like that, where we leave the world we know to enter a new realm, much like Alice falling down the rabbit hole (for me, without the pills, just a pint of pub beer).

As a tourist rather than a travel professional, I asked myself the same questions I’ve asked others: why do we travel, what do we hope to get from the trip, and what did I get from my trip to share with others?

For me, this trip was a confluence of forces, initiated by friends who were going there and asked me to join them. No marketing, referrals, or outside media influences were involved. However, after doing further research online, and even buying guidebooks (oh yes!) specifically on London and the South Coast of England, what I learned made it easy for me to succumb. The itinerary, sights, and history and culture I excitedly anticipated in a country as old as England, with evidence of humanity from four to five thousand years ago in Dartmoor National Park and Stonehenge, up to today’s British royal family was very enticing. Why, what lured me and excited me?

To justify a three-week trip, I sought experiences that would move me, transport me, awe me, and surprise me and that would stay with me to take home and savor long afterward. I wanted others who heard about my adventures to want to travel somewhere themselves.

I wanted to see and know about the “olde” east-end London of Dickens’ Oliver and the former Jewish community there (no longer), how Churchill fought and helped win World War II from his underground war rooms, how West-end musicals compare to New York City’s Broadway (very well), if the white cliffs of Dover are really white and why (it’s the chalk), what’s the big deal about changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace (it is, not sure why), how one makes a “Cornish pasty,” what still makes Stonehenge such a marvel and mystery, and so much more about British history, its ways of life, its people, and its emergence over the centuries.

All I saw and did in those three weeks moved me intellectually and emotionally, putting me back in time to how people lived (and survived), adding understanding to where we, both the U.S. with our fraught connection to the U.K. and society today, evolving from this history, starting before, with and after the Magna Carta, which I saw in original at the British Library.

Over the millennia, most “common” people struggled until fairly recently, while royalty subjugated and lived well off peon labor, though royalty were not without their challenges (just ask the six wives of Henry the VIII!).  

I say, if we know history, we can understand how and why we are here today, and our place in this continuum to succeeding generations, especially to learn from what preceded us.

What was done over centuries has led to today, just as what we do today will impact the future. While this seems obvious, seeing it in a country as old as England makes it so much more potent and applicable to what we do here at home in the U.S. 

I made it a point to engage with locals throughout the trip and found everyone to be kind, friendly, and extremely helpful in many ways, seemingly far more so than I find people at home.

It made a big difference as to how I viewed the British, and they us. Such person-to-person exchanges, even among strangers, build understanding, break down barriers, and go beyond screaming headline news to hear what regular people think. We tend to like one another more than we may expect when we have such conversations.

Among the things I appreciate about the places I visited in England is that they mostly gets the basics right for visitors. Top examples include ample and clean public restrooms (most with electric dryers, not paper towels, thus saving so many trees, processing, and trash); great wayfinding signage around town and for air and rail transportation; and an excellent underground train system (the “tube”) with frequent service, clean stations and trains, and actual humans helping passengers at every station – not behind a caged booth, but accessible at entry turnstiles.

A member of our tour group left his backpack on a train; not only was it found intact, but it was also shipped back to the U.S. through customs, so he’d have it when he got home.  

I found reasonable prices, lower than here, even considering the higher pound-dollar exchange rate difference, another point of the U.S.’ competitive disadvantage as a world destination.  

London, despite heavy traffic – much of it from tourist busses – is an extremely walkable city, something I miss terribly in Los Angeles. I walked 15,000 – 20,000 steps (6 – 8 miles) each day, traversing easily through London’s various picturesque neighborhoods, as well as in the quaint villages where we lodged along the way.

Every neighborhood and village are unique, with an identifiable sense of place – and a hometown pride, based on its history, its dwellings, inns, eateries, pubs, offerings, and its people – where I felt connected and part of, deepening my experience, memory and feeling of and in each place.

Now I am home, and back to reality; awakened from the dream. But I will carry my experiences, feelings, and knowledge with me, and maybe even help improve our visitor offerings and treatment to help them feel as welcome and cared about as they made me feel.  

Our "industry" is misnamed – are we really doing this work just for revenue and taxes? Travel and tourism are a means to help build bridges by sharing our different yet common human experiences, foibles, and interests, contributing to our mutual (and dare I say world?) betterment.  This is why I love my work in travel, and as a visitor myself. 

I will remember this travel dream and start planning the next one very soon!