What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
What’s the longest trip I’ve ever taken?
If we are measuring miles, I have several contenders. Britain to Hong Kong is a fair distance. So are Britain to Vancouver or San Diego, and Britain to Nairobi.
If “longest” means the time spent getting somewhere, then it’s sailing across the Atlantic. We started in Gran Canaria, sailed south to Cape Verde, and then struck out across the Atlantic for Barbados. That felt like a journey in the old-fashioned sense: you didn’t simply disappear into an airport and emerge somewhere else a few hours later. For weeks on end, the journey was six blokes in a yacht. We sailed it.
If a trip means going away for a substantial period, however, my longest may have begun on 3 December 1980, when, aged eighteen, I left Britain for Val d’Isère in the French Alps. I stayed until 3 May 1981. Does it count if I was working? I had a job and a room; I became part of the hotel and the resort rather than merely passing through it. Yet it was also one of the great journeys of my life: spending a winter in the French Alps, skiing, learning French, working, meeting people and discovering that I could make a life somewhere else.
But there is another answer.
My daughter asked me just yesterday when I was born. As in time of day! She knows my birthdays coming up.
“Four o’clock in the morning, 27 September 1961,” I told her.
Then I added, joking: “I remember it well.”
Obviously I don’t — though I remember what my mother told me about it. And the intervening years until I could form a memory of my own.
So that perhaps that is the real answer for any of us. My longest trip began at four o’clock that morning. Hong Kong, Vancouver, San Diego, New York, Egypt, Nairobi, the Atlantic, the Alps: they are journeys within the journey.
So, at nearly sixty-five years and counting, the longest trip I’ve ever taken is this one.
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