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After last week’s furore around Kirstie Allsop’s interrailing 15-year-old, a clutch of our finest writers share their own anecdotes
It is one of life’s great rites of passage. Just like a first kiss, a first alcoholic beverage and the first time behind the wheel of a moving car, the first overseas holiday taken without parental company is one of the key stations on the journey towards full and functioning adulthood.
On the track behind you lie the innocent joys of early childhood. In front sit responsibility, gainful employment and foreign getaways that, horrifyingly, you have to pay for with your own cash. And on the platform where you suddenly find yourself, in a late stage of adolescence… a giddy vision of escape, minus a paternal or maternal safety net – and the prospect of mishap and misadventure that such untethered travels can bring.
Such holidays have been in the headlines in the last few days, via the mild controversy surrounding television personality Kirstie Allsopp, and the revelation that her 15-year-old son has just returned from an interrailing jaunt around Europe. This snippet of silly-season reportage has come with a side order of melodrama, via the news that this elaborate odyssey – conducted with an older friend in tow – has pricked the ears of social services.
But leaving aside the questions of how young is too young when it comes to going abroad without family back-up, and whether a property-show presenter really needs to be dragged through the court of public opinion for apparently violating some sacred code of matriarchal conduct, our first forays on our own two feet do tend to make for funny tales.
Below, several members of the Telegraph Travel writing team reach back – some farther than others – into their own late-teenage wanderings, recalling the optimism, occasional foolishness and inevitable “oops” moments that come with being let off the holiday leash. No doubt you have your own anecdotes to share – please do so, in the comments below.
Greg Dickinson, Senior Travel Writer
In upper sixth form, the post-exams rite of passage was to go on a boozy trip to “shagaluf”, but I went interrailing around Europe with three friends instead. I’d love to paint this as an enlightened Grand Tour, but it wasn’t. We called ourselves Team Sparkle (a Donnie Darko reference) and woke up covered in mosquito bites after a beach party on Venice Lido, were threatened by skinheads in Krakow and sat through an excruciating “ping pong” show in Amsterdam (ask no questions). When my friend, Nathan, ran out of money halfway through the trip, he flew home and called us from the job centre the next day.
But I wouldn’t change a thing. The trip offered us a first taste of proper independence and taught us how to solve problems in daunting situations abroad. Now in our mid-30s, Team Sparkle are all fathers now, and we meet up every few years in new European locations (such as Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France or Comporta, Portugal) to reminisce over that ridiculous summer of 2008.
Hazel Plush, freelance travel writer
Quite ridiculously, my first time travelling solo – properly solo, not staying with relatives or cadging a lift from my mum – was a nine-month trip across Africa, Australia and New Zealand. I flew out to Kenya as a recently turned 18-year-old, laughably naive to the ways of the world, let alone how to get from the airport to my hotel in hot, frenetic Nairobi. It wasn’t actually the travelling that catapulted me into adulthood, but the working (and scrimping) that it took to get me there. I’d been saving since I was a babysitter for my parents’ friends, squirrelling away every £20 note as it represented a night in a Sydney hostel.
I joined an overlanding trip across Africa, the youngest in the 30-strong group – my first sip of beer, my first proper boyfriend, my first sniff of weed (not all unrelated). The journey matured me, shifted my outlook, inspired my career – and yes, it was the making of me. I wish more young people had the opportunity to travel; we bemoan the rising price of holidays, but it clips the wings of adventurous young people too – and at what cost?
Anthony Peregrine, Telegraph Travel’s France expert
My first solo trip abroad was less a holiday and more a parting of the ways with university. After a few first-year months, I’d had enough of supply curves, Hobbes and AJ Ayer – and they’d clearly had enough of me. I took off on the night train to Paris (via Dover; the Chunnel was then not even a distant threat). I needed liberty and time to myself. (Students in the late 1970s were quite as toxically self-indulgent as they are today.) I’d told no one I was going, nor worried that anyone might care. For economic reasons, I ended up in the sort of moth-eaten doss house with which Paris used to welcome the impoverished.
The steps of Sacré-Coeur were where the young, rootless and broke congregated. Lacking busking and thieving skills, I took to gathering returnable bottles. This seemed less desperate than it sounds now, but only just. I hitchhiked to St Malo, went to the labour exchange and was sent to Jersey along with other long-haired youths of broad ideas and limited horizons. We were to undertake the early potato harvest. Following the tractor under an unfiltered sun, on the knees from dawn to dusk, it was the hardest work I’d ever done. Ten of us lived in a rooming house, nine French drop-outs and me. We got on fine over cigarettes and beer – I don’t remember food – and the fact that I could explain Dylan’s lyrics in French. Then the Jersey police turned up in the potato field. I’d told a friend where I was. He’d told my family. They wanted me back. So did the university.
Sarah Baxter, freelance travel writer
I blame a bloke called Emlyn. He was going to a talk at the student union about something called BUNAC, and did I want to go along? An hour later, the travel bug had bitten; I was determined to spend my first uni summer holidays with the British Universities North America Club. My parents were horrified, possibly with just cause. That first night in Manhattan, the sirens didn’t stop. Then I headed to Massachusetts, where I’d secured a job at a fancy yacht club – which wasn’t me at all. So, shamefully, I did a runner, catching a succession of buses to Maryland’s Ocean City, where I’d heard there was a better vibe. But I had no job, no friends, no home. As my first day there drew to a close, the horror began to dawn. Then a chance chat on a bus led to a floor to sleep on, potential work and new chums. A week later I was sorted. Only then did I call my mum.
Chris Moss, freelance travel writer
I went camping with friends in the Lakes – hitching and trains – at age 15 and 16. We did long night walks to northern towns without parental support (or knowledge), just to escape the boredom of home and school. Aged 18, at university, I did my first Interrail and it blew my mind. I went with fellow student Bob, who was 19, and we zipped to Amsterdam, Paris and Toulouse, slept on benches, shared couchettes with random people, dossed in a building site on the Algarve, walked for miles without a plan, ate and drank anything and everything, and met a fascinating hermit in Lourdes. The trip was life-enhancing, world-revealing. In fact, I’m not sure I ever got over it. I did another Interrail with a girlfriend at 21 and again at 50. I have never really stopped travelling since. Furthermore, Bob is still my best friend – travel creates lifelong bonds.
Gemma Knight, Senior Commissioning Editor
At 17, my best friend and I backpacked around Scandinavia for a month. It was glorious – safe, easy to navigate and full of friendly, helpful people – the perfect place to dip our toes into the intoxicating waters of parent-free travel. We overstuffed our backpacks (the first of many lessons learnt) and flew to Copenhagen, where we spent two nights with my Danish family (how wonderful, on that daunting precipice, to be met by two smiling, familiar faces). Then we set off into the great unknown. There were hiccups – a night in a Norwegian A&E; a gentleman with a chainsaw who unwittingly stepped off a building site and into our path one night in Gothenburg; a remote hotel in Flåm where everything was made of antlers – but for the most part, it was a month of wonder, friendship and fun. It taught us much about each other and ourselves, confirmed a lifelong love of travel, and cemented a friendship that – many miles and many backpacks later – has never wavered.
Chris Leadbeater, Travel Correspondent
As is often the case with these things, it involved a girl. I had mis-spent a youthful July and August, toiling at an uninspiring summer job in a windowless basement, where the only respite was the chance to flirt, increasingly openly, with a co-worker who happened to be newly single. A connection was made, and when we had both returned to our respective universities, an invitation was extended to come out and see her. Better still, she had just started a year abroad – in a Barcelona that was well advanced in its process of post-Olympic regeneration, but not yet swamped by overtourism. Who would say no?
This was not so many decades ago that the internet didn’t yet exist, but the idea of buying a flight on your phone would have sounded like wild science fiction, had anyone suggested it. Instead, I wandered down to a high-street travel agent, sat in front of a desk where a nice lady listened to my request, and left with a hand-written return ticket to the Catalonian capital, complete with counterfoil versions, to be torn off. How very exciting.
As it turned out, about as exciting as it got. I landed in Spain to the news that the boyfriend who had been dispensed with in the August had managed to dislodge the “ex” prefix from his status. And though he wasn’t there in Barcelona, his presence was never far away, via regular phone calls. I spent three largely solitary days exploring the city under damp skies; I can still picture this puppy-dog version of me, trying and failing to find shelter as the heavens opened midway through a tour of the very much unfinished Sagrada Familia. The rain was so hard that the ink on my plane ticket home, stupidly stowed in my backpack, became smudgy, blurred, and sufficiently illegible to prompt questions back at the airport. After a few tense minutes, I was issued with a replacement. Perhaps the check-in staff knew a forlorn young man when they saw one, and took pity.