A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step

My passion for travel started when I use to run away from home. Not that there was anything wrong growing up. I had a great childhood. No, I ran away to explore without permission. I would blag my way on to National Express coaches or trains and just see where I ended up. I now need to watch travel programmes with a back scratcher to see to my itchy feet, especially at the present moment when current travel restrictions don’t allow us to go abroad.

I have been lucky enough to visit a lot of this world but not as much as I would like to. I would love to train it from Beijing to Moscow. While I’m typing this why don’t I start a list. See if I can cross some of them off and write about them in my travel blog and share recipes from the places where I eat. Mobility is sometimes an issue with me but when I read stories of men without limbs climbing Everest it puts things in perspective. Dodgy knees, hips and back are chipped nails in comparison. 

  • Train from Moscow to Beijing. Yes, I know it’s the other way around from what I just said, but I just changed my mind.
  • Drive across the USA.
  • Patagonia
  • Middle of some jungle somewhere.

Travel Plans September 2023

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Travel and writing and USA.

This page was originally written 4 years ago.

I’ve deleted all the wish list and sob sob stories of travel restrictions through lockdown. Who wants to read about places I wanted to go to but couldn’t.

In the last 2 years I have travelled a lot within the UK in my new Ish VW Campervan. I’ve name her ‘Wee’. My van wee ‘Myfanwy’ is a Welsh love song, see what I did there? So clever.

I’ve been sampling a lot of the UK to sample villages, towns and cities to get inspiration and research content for my stories and books. I have written a lot and surprisingly got into poetry as well, although that is another story you are going to hear A LOT about soon. Meanwhile I’m getting all my work together to come up with some food travel humour thingy that may quench your thirst for boredom.

Anyway, I’m off to America next month. I feel like the character Lloyd in my book ‘Taking the Biscuit’ goes to meet relations he has there and strikes up a romance with a girl) not a relation though. That’s an idea I have for a magazine article).

I’m going to sample life in the good old US of A. Get into their heads and food. A lot of the characters in my works so far seem to be not far off my own life experiences. With that in mind I decided to indulge. The plan is to travel back and for. Its no good saying I know all about a place just after a few months. I really want to get involved.

Well, there you have it.

As always, watch this space.

 

Ian

Honey, I’m home.
Well, that went well. I’ve well and truly got the bug for the USA now, and through a lot of research and thought for the second part of my book, I have decided that Lloyd, ‘the main character’, is going to be going back and forth ( as I intend to do). He will meet an American girl working on the pot wash of a hotel in Cardiff. He falls in love and is devastated when she has to go back. He takes the plunge and one day arrives on her doorstep in a small town in Georgia. It’s going to be fun and foody.
I was surprised by the originality of the food I experienced there but couldn’t help but think something was missing and that there was far too much of something. Restaurants seemed to enjoy experimenting with combinations of food, which was great, and everything had far too much salt and sugar. A bag of cheese and onion crips, when I got back, tasted saltless in comparison. Do they add sodium to make people ill so they can profit from the health industry?
I have pages of notes from the following few chapters of my story, and I’m eager to put them to use. The material I found and my research significantly contributed to this book. I could not have got the feelings I have now by doing this online. You have to go prod and poke things for yourself and for your characters.
Lloyd is going to be putting on a bit of weight. Primarily because of the job he gets in a pizza parlour run by his girlfriend’s family.

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