Hold your horses

25 April 2011

Rothley

Well it’s not all go just yet. There’s still three days until I get back to London, so in the meantime I make my way over to the source of that village-shaking ‘toot’: an old steam train station.

This place is quite cool; to think of a time without electricity is more difficult than it seems – give it a go. Interrupting my wondering is the poewrful chug and crunch of the train as it pulls in. You’d really feel like you’d be going somewhere on this thing. The steam puffs as those on board imagine themselves going, just like the train used to, to some beachside destination. Except everyone has to remain in their warmer gear. What a holiday…

Crap destinations aside, I can’t help but think that travel was more of an event than it is now for the average person. You would make your way to the station, get your cases on, experience that coal-hungry machine pull away and actually see yourself getting there, not just magically teleport (i.e. air travel). When you get there, there were no expensive package holidays deals which the average family spends their cash on. It is now all too common that the Brits go on their all expenses paid resort and will never leave until their magic teleporter takes them back with nothing more to think about.

Not that these are bad things, as the complete mindlessness of it all is quite appealing to me and to many, but a rewarding sense of travel for the average person, achieved by solving problems, thinking in different ways and true freedom, is being swept under the carpet in favour of these short package deals. Even this backpacking thing is being taken under by these packages. This, in isolation, I stress is not a bad thing, as it gets more people out into the world bla bla bla , but up and coming travelers may not ever be aware of the real thing until it’s too late: after the trip; After the Busabout; after the trip to Ibiza; after the ripoff Interrail/Eurail pass.

Apart from that, that’s all I’m thinking of today, as the weight off my mind of the prospect of no peanut wage work and backpacking has gotten me into a state of ease and’brain breeze’, if I were to describe the feeling. To showcase this, all I have to say is that I was watching the 2006 remake of Superman, and I drifted off to sleep, taking it as seriously as I did when I was fourteen years old. The breeze blows.