WELL, as Standard diarist Thomas Octavius predicted, I’ve started my latest journey.
My aim had been to travel to California on a container ship via the Panama canal, stay there through the winter, write a California diary for the Standard while there before continuing west across the Pacific, down to Singapore, up through the Suez Canal and home.
Why? Well, mainly because, like many of my generation, I didn’t have a gap year when I left school. There wasn’t the opportunity and there wasn’t the money.
Now I’m trying to make up for it and have my gap at the other end of my life.
Planning the canals journey wasn’t as easy as I had envisaged. There were no ships travelling the route I wanted to take and, although I considered catching a ship to the east coast of America and boarding another for the rest of the journey, there was a problem. There are now very few ships registered in the US and foreign ships are prohibited by law from taking people from one American port to another.
I could have travelled east via the Suez Canal to California but the journey is very slow and, because I’d left it so late, I would have been crossing the Pacific in winter and wouldn’t have reached California until January.
In the end, I opted for crossing the Atlantic to Philadelphia and driving across America to the west coast — and to start the canal journey from there. So, on Friday, September 24, in the same manner as last time, I walked to the bus stop at the end of my road, caught a bus to the station using my bus pass and caught a train from Reading to Liverpool via Birmingham. There, I boarded the container ship Independent Pursuit.
I was shown my cabin, the free-fall lifeboat over the stern and, more worryingly, my reserved seat just inside the door.
As it happened, the Atlantic crossing was uneventful. The sea was very calm for the time of year — the opposite of when I crossed four years ago from west to east. The weather was either sunshine or fog with the fog-horn on much of the time. I saw very little wildlife — a few dolphins and one whale.
One thing I did see, however, were wheelie bins like those that have caused such a stir in Henley lined up on the deck. It seems I just can’t get away from them, even in the middle of the Atlantic!
Because of the time differences between England and America, we put the clocks back an hour almost every other day so I kept getting an extra hour in bed, which was nice.
The food was excellent and the crew of seven officers and 11 other ranks were very friendly, even though some of their English wasn’t great.
Last Sunday, in brilliant sunshine, we sailed up the Delaware river and docked at Chester, the port just down from Philadelphia. On Monday, I hired a car and set the satnav for Highway One, California, some 2,800 miles to the west, and let it decide on the route — but I’ll tell you about that next time.
FOUR years ago, Michael Jones, pictured, left home to spend 84 days travelling around the world without flying. His method of transport was bus, train, container ship and car. He called it his “wheels and keels” journey. Now Michael, archivist for Henley Royal Regatta and Leander Club, is on his travels again. He has left for California, where he plans to live for six months, once again without going by air. Here, in the first of a regular series of columns, Michael reports on progress.
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Published on 19 October 2009
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