Thank you to our faithful followers for your encouragement and comments!  So here are our thoughts.

As we slowly worked through our “to do” list in 2020 which was drawn up in Thailand over Christmas 2019, we came across boxes of transparencies/slides taken on previous trips prior to the digital age. From this came an idea: why not try and see if we can retrospectively record our experiences from our first attempt at a RTW adventure over 38 years ago in 1982. 

When we considered how we should record our trip, this blog came to mind. This would give us a permanent, easily accessible, record of our travel from this time, in a format that we are familiar working with. While this is a self indulgent exercise for us, it might fill in for the lack of travel we are all suffering from.  We thought it would be an interesting comparison between that first attempt and our more recent trips.   What was travel like 38 years ago?

So how will this work?  During our cleaning up, we also uncovered old tickets, receipts and maps, dug up a few faded photos plus the transparencies/slides. We received copies of letters we sent en-route to friends and family. We even still have items that travelled with us, I Anthony is more reluctant to throw stuff out than Anne is.  Anthony’s defence is that seeing and handling an item can illicit more memories that just a photo.

To start the process, each of us separately jotted down a high level list of memories, before we looked at the pictures, to see what we could remember unaided. How will writing in the present about long past experiences work? We shall see.

What will be missing? Sadly neither of us kept a detailed diary that we can fall back on to fill in the gaps so our thoughts and musings at the time. Many we met travelling were recording their travels to write a book later,  I am not sure how many ever did. What will also be missing are the names of many wonderful people that we met, which is a pity. I did find a small notebook in which I kept diary notes for the first month of our journey.  A review of my simplistic scribblings confirmed the theory that I had limited literary skills at that time. Anne keeps saying that I have improved immensely since then.

What memories will we dredge up as we go through this process? We have no idea, but this will be an interesting challenge, given what I, Anthony, when asked to remember my childhood, would only fill a couple of A4 pages. How does someone write their memoirs and produce a book?!  

The result we hope will a permanent record of our first and somewhat naive, long term travel adventure. Some of you will actually feature in this journey, a bit like an Alfred Hitchcock film where the director appears in a walk-on role early on in the story.  

Drawing on the structure of the Star Wars movie series, we have numbered the last two RTW trips, Episodes 1 and 2, and so we will title this one “Episode 0 : In the beginning”.

We appreciate our patient followers’ forbearance. So here goes……

– Anne & Anthony