ONE MOTORHOME. TWO PEOPLE. 8000 MILES

One motorhome. Two People. 8000 miles. Our journey around Britain began in May 2002. I kept a diary for the trip and began to write as a travel book in early 2003. A year later, having almost completed the final chapter, my husband, 34 at the time, was diagnosed with cancer. I saved the file and carried on with life.

In the seventeen years that have followed that trip, my life has changed completely… but, has life in Britain? Stuck in lockdown, with the threat of the Coronavirus outside my door and two unenthusiastic children to home school, I found the file by accident whilst tidying my pc folders. Of course, the computer has changed beyond recognition, it no longer protrudes into the room taking up 2 square feet of desk space. The screen is now twice as wide and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t make that annoying dial-up sound every time I want to check my emails.

So, early one morning, whilst my family slept, I opened the file and began to wonder. Just how much in those seventeen years has life changed for all of us. Every single one of us has been affected, in some way, by the lightning speed at which the internet has come into our homes, our work and our travels. Just how different would that journey have been had we been travelling now?

Using the internet, I started to find out.

No social media

Looking back it’s hard to see how we survived. There was no social media, mobile phones were for talking (remember that?) and texting. You couldn’t look up who killed who in Eastenders in 1994 whilst sitting on a beach in St. Lucia (I’ve never done that by the way). We didn’t know what our neighbours were doing, unless we saw them over the garden fence. We were far more disconnected, but in some ways, it made life easier.

We’d moved on since my travels in the early 1990s. When I flew off to distant countries to backpack, the only way my parents knew where I was, was if I phoned on a pay phone. Usually, once a fortnight, because it was so expensive. There was Poste Restante, which sounds incredibly romantic and, to be honest, it was. Queuing up at a tiny post office located in a hut on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hoping that someone had remembered me, will stay with me forever.

No phone, no internet, no Tripadvisor

Travelling around Britain, staying at a different place every night, meant a lot of decisions about where to stay. We had a pay as you go mobile phone on this trip, but no internet, no Google and no Tripadvisor. We had a few books including the Caravan and Camping Guide, which proved invaluable. My evenings were spent reading guide books, deciding where to visit and working out the best campsite to stay at. I then had to phone ahead. There were no reviews to check, but, it made it all a bit more exciting. Travelling into the unknown. I wouldn’t dream of booking somewhere to stay now without checking it out on Tripadvisor.

Payment to the smaller sites was usually in cash, £5 a night as I remember. For the larger sites, we paid by cheque. ‘Contactless’ was a futuristic dream and probably something in a 1960s episode of ‘Star Trek’.

To contact family and friends, we used email cafes (very few) and phone boxes (when we ran out of money to top up the phone). Yes, phone boxes, only seen now in films from the olden days or ‘Paddington’.

I’m not quite sure now how we knew what was going on in the outside world. We bought the occasional paper but what a difference from today with our non-stop 24 hour news on our phones. Could we have done the trip today without knowing about the Coronavirus pandemic? Blissfully driving around the Highlands of Scotland thinking the locals were a bit strange wearing facial masks. Of course not. But, it was nice being cut off. We took an old portable TV to watch the football World Cup but, unfortunately, one of the heavy travel books landed on it as we pulled up at traffic lights and that was the end of that entertainment.

And so, back to our trip…

The day I fell in love with Britain