How do you prefer to travel?

It seems a funny question to ask because it has various meanings. The answers could be safely, in comfort, on time, cheaply or many other ways of describing travelling. However I think the question really means what way do you prefer to travel and the answer to that is my standard answer - it depends. I have had the priviledge of living at a time when travel has changed greatly.

I grew up before the era of mass travel. At that time in the 1940s through to the early 1960s there was very little beyond the car (and very few people had one) and; in England, the bus and train were the major means of local or country wide transport. For international travel it was by ocean liner, though there were ferries across to Europe. I have vivid memories of our our trips to see my grandmother in North Wales and we went by car and occasionally we would detour via Liverpool and drop into to see Uncle Dick, my great uncle, and who became my step grandfather in the early 1950s.

He was a pawnbroker and had a store close to the docks in Liverpool and often we would walk down to the docks and take a trip on the Liverpool Dock Railway. This was an elevated railway that ran for miles along the River Mersey and gave a great view of the docks which at the time were some of the busiest in Britain. You could look down and see hundreds of big ships, freighters and ocean liners that would take you to exotic places like India, The Americas, Australia and South Africa.

Perhaps it was then that I first got the travel bug thinking how exciting it would be to visit some of these places that were just names on a map or a world globe. Little did I know that I would come to Canada on one of them, the "Empress of Canada", and leave from Liverpool with the band playing and leaving my brother, mother and father standing on the dockside as we moved away. All very emotional. Within ten years the ocean liners had all but disappeared although a few continued as cruise vessels.

Airlines were the way of the future. The early days of air travel were really quite pleasant, nothing like the unpleasant experiences that flying today brings with it. You were treated as a guest, you had adequate seating and leg room, meals were very good (particularly the steak dinners that you had on Wardair flights to the UK! ) and there was none of the security checking that comes with flying today. So I don't see flying as a preferred way of travel though of course there really is no alternative for going overseas or even across the country.

One just has to hold one's nose and get on with it. The same goes for car travel, the roads are busy and eating options on the major highways are an insult to one's stomache. Strike that one off the list too. If I had to answer and say what way would I like to travel on holiday then it is a toss up between a river boat and a train journey.

We have done river trips on the Nile, the Rhine, the Yangtze and the Volga and had train journeys in China, Vietnam, Australia and the United States though the food on the Amtrak trains did not even match the fast food options of the I5! Maybe we are just getting old! Joel It would have been cool to see the docks. Somehow I think Terminal 4 at Heathrow lacks the same romanticism these days.