I remember quite clearly my four main areas of activity for my retirement life when I started out on this whole retirement business. They were, in no particular order, – this retirement blog, our vineyard, music in some form and travel. Well three out of four achieved to some degree isn’t bad.
The missing one, at least in the long distance format we had anticipated, is travel. We had vaguely imagined a trip to Colorado this past September but for a variety of reasons both personal and otherwise (mainly Covid related) that didn’t happen. Our traditional annual Irish trip also fell by the wayside for the same reason.
This year we have managed now, two hotel stays. The last one last week at The Devonshire Fell and previous to that The Devonshire Arms about which I wrote a few months ago. As both these hotels are within the boundaries of Yorkshire it barely qualifies as travel. But one takes what one can get in difficult times.
Apart from the odd visits to the vineyard / barn and a few Derbyshire trips the only other retirement activity modestly in the travel category has been train trips. One a few weeks ago was my steam train trip in Derbyshire and the second was last week. I’ll come back to this trip in a moment.
We have a London trip planned for the beginning of December and the reason this is significant in the context of this travel blog, apart from the obvious fact that we will, in a Covid context, be what we call ‘travelling’ (that’s assuming we don’t all get shut down again of course), is that we decided to renew our senior rail cards. These have lapsed in the last 18 months or so, again thanks to the pandemic.
I mentioned in a recent retirement blog the trouble we’d had getting our photos taken for the card but now we’ve got them again of course we feel obliged to try and use them. Hence my earlier reference to the second train trip. I had to smile when we set this up as a last minute activity during our last week’s hotel visit to Burnsall. We’ve been round the world a few times and long-distance travel was quite the norm for us. This journey was 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back, to Keightley. Now that is what I call glamour.
We had paid a visit to Skipton to do a little shopping and Skipton has a main line station. It’s where, on one occasion, we started a journey on the legendary Leeds- Carlisle line crossing the outstanding Ribbleshead Viaduct, but I digress. On this occasion I had the brilliant idea of how to use our rail cards and at the same time give Archie, the dog, the opportunity to become familiar and hopefully comfortable with being on a train. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before Archie, he being a dog, doesn’t like trains, or specifically tunnels and rattling over points. Millie, our other dog, just climbs aboard, lies on the floor and goes to sleep. That’s one good traveller. But for Archie, a short journey somewhere there and back might just help with his therapy.
This part of the plan worked well, better than the part which involved using our rail cards because we’d left these at home. Fair enough we’d never planned a train trip as part of this two night hotel stay. And the whole journey cost £6.84 for two of us (dogs travel free), there and back, so a railcard reduction wouldn’t have been huge. (see above for proof).
And, as I say, Archie was quite well-behaved. He did have one enormous wuff when we started off but, as the carriage was completely empty, it didn’t really matter. True, if he carried on wuffing and the carriage had been full, as it might well be if we try this plan again, then it would have been problematic. But taking the positives out of it, the cunning plan worked well.
Which opens the door for more travel of this type. True we won’t be taking the train across Europe, along the Spanish coast or through Swiss snow-clad mountains, from Paris to Rome etc, but Skipton to Keightley well, it’s a start isn’t it?
We have more, still admittedly modest, plans, starting this week with a 15 minute trip from Headingley into Leeds. Followed by, if this goes well, a much more ambitious journey from Leeds to Beverley, change at Hull, (to see the excellent minister – also a missing part of our retirement plan, i.e to visit churches and cathedrals). We may even set up a Derbyshire-based train adventure. Maybe from Duffield (scene of my recently reported steam train trip) to, say, Chesterfield and we all know about the famous crooked spire of Chesterfield. That’s it below in case you’re not familiar.
But that’s all for the future, slowly, slowly catchee monkey as somebody once said. Strange thing to say but you get the idea. If phase one of our retirement train travel plan goes well it might just belatedly reinstate that part of our retirement plan which has been sadly lacking. Even before Covid it was flagging and the pandemic finished it off altogether. So this is our attempt to slowly get it started again.
Of course there is a moral here. It’s something along the lines of, if there is a part of your retirement that is missing and it’s proving tough to get started and you would like to have it reinstated into your retirement plans / activities, then the way to go about it is slowly and in small steps. So small and slow that you hardly notice you’re doing it, unless you have a dog like Archie of course who will wuff when he notices he’s being taken advantage of. But generally, this approach works.