The Trips of a Lifetime

The train shed at Antwerp Central.

Heading into 2024, I decided that rather than continue as I’d done, attempting to balance visits to new destinations with refreshers of old favourites, I would instead spend 12 months fully immersed in the past. A boarding school reunion had been touted for December, and in the months leading up to it I hoped to revisit some of the places that had been most important to me growing up: especially previous homes in Elgin, Canberra, Brüggen and Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Almost immediately, however, the reunion was bumped to early 2025 and a jolly to southeastern Australia began to look logistically and financially unviable. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to visit in the autumn, ideally around the time of the Canberra Balloon Spectacular—which would mean being ready to fly from the Northern Hemisphere in early spring. It seemed an awfully long way to go without proper planning and provision. Nevertheless, I resolved to otherwise stick to the original plan and revisit as many other formative places as possible. Here, then, are the highlights from my year of nostalgia.

Roermond, Limburg, the Netherlands

A lot of my time in Germany was spent on military bases. I lived for a time on RAF Brüggen, attended school on JHQ Rheindahlen and regularly spent weekends at Geilenkirchen or other NATO bases scattered around the country. Our nearest substantial town, meanwhile, was across the Dutch border in Roermond, around which a lot of everyday life had revolved thanks to its shops, cinemas and restaurants—or in my case McDonald’s.

I’d arranged to meet an old school friend who still lived locally and spent a very happy hour with her and her son eating French onion soup at one of the beer gardens on Munsterplein. Unexpectedly, she offered to drive me the short distance to Elmpt, a small village by the since decommissioned base in which we’d both lived upon our arrival in Germany. What followed was an incredibly poignant tour of our old houses, the local park along Grunewaldstraße and the now-derelict NAAFI, before we went back to her current home to talk more about the present.

Hopeman, Moray, Scotland

Similar to Brüggen, it was a military posting that brought my father—and by extension family—to RAF Lossiemouth. Unlike Brüggen, however, most of our time there was spent on civvy street in nearby Elgin. Later attending university at Aberdeen, I’d continued to meet people from the area, so while all of my school friends had since been relocated or become estranged, I still had plenty of reasons to return.

Still, it would’ve felt like an oversight and a missed opportunity if I hadn’t travelled back this year in particular, so I arranged to stay with an old Aberdeen flatmate a short distance away in the coastal town of Burghead. Catching the 5:50 train from Monifeith, I was in Elgin for the back of nine and keen to make the most of the afternoon while my friend was still at work—meeting a mutual friend for coffee on Batchen Street, stopping by my old house on Reynolds Crescent and all the while savouring the smell of shortbread and the sound of Typhoons performing sorties overhead. But it was that evening, eating and drinking at Bootleggers Bar & Grill in neighbouring Hopeman, that will stick most in my memory, even if the walk back is a merry blur.

Central Station, Antwerp, Belgium

The nostalgic pull of Belgium centred predominantly on a memorable long weekend in Bruges we’d once spent with family friends from Canberra, now based in Brussels, and I duly retraced our steps around Grote Markt and along the Groenerei canal. But what had really made me prioritise a return to Belgium was an old photo I’d found of myself standing on a misty bridge next to a sign for Antwerp—a city neither I or my parents could remember visiting.

I arrived in Antwerp by train after spending a couple of days in Paris, Lille, Charleroi and Brussels, and it was love at first (or second) sight. The train station and Eurostar terminus is like a cathedral, grander than any other, and descends several levels below ground. It was from this dark crypt that I first emerged, taking the escalator into a train shed filled with light before exiting through a marble foyer that needed to be seen to be believed. I loved everything about Antwerp, but over the next few days couldn’t pass the station without having another nosy inside. I never did find that road sign, or at any point experience even a modicum of deja vu, but I shan’t be forgetting it again.

Kingshouse, Glencoe, Scotland

10 years previously, almost to the day, myself and three friends walked the West Highland Way from Milngavie in Glasgow to Fort William in the Highlands. There were plans to reunite for an unrelated ramble in tribute, but I wanted to mark the anniversary myself and revisit the Way itself. I settled on a night at Kingshouse, where we’d finished my favourite day of walking and to which we’d already returned on numerous occasions.

I arrived via Citylink from Glasgow in the driving rain, having watched the weather forecast deteriorate in the days prior to departure. Deposited on the roadside about a mile from the hotel, I traced a small section of the West Highland Way through open moorland towards the eastern entrance to Glencoe. There, waiting to greet me once again, were the resident red deer herd. Though already soaked through, I stopped short of reception and spent a contented hour photographing the stags as they strutted around the grounds, the surrounding mountains occasionally materialising out of the gloom.

Lerwick, Shetland, Scotland

I still found time this year to do a few things that were totally new to me, and one was a flying visit to Lerwick. Well, it was actually a journey undertaken by ferry, but I only planned to stay on Shetland for 12 hours and return that evening on the very same vessel. In truth, it was the sailing itself I was most excited about, as the observation deck would give me a new perspective on Aberdeen and the route would take me through waters rich in marine life.

After a sleepless night in an £18 pod, I rose early, showered and breakfasted on a black pudding roll. As soon as it was light enough, I returned to the observation deck, braced against the wind and the cold, and watched Shetland emerge out of the morning mist—fulmars, gannets and terns swarming all around us. By the time we docked just outside of town, the sun had burnt through and there wasn’t a cloud left in the sky. I’d even seen a whale, just off the coast of Peterhead, though it only surfaced twice and I never managed to catch it on camera.

Aiguille du Midi, Chamonix, France

After a number of years in which I regularly commuted to France’s Côte d’Azur to dog-sit for high-flying university friends, I’d more recently found myself drawn to Switzerland instead, starting many onward journeys into the Bernese Oberland and beyond from Geneva. Although I’d long wanted to explore more of the Alps beyond its border, until now I’d been unwilling to leave Switzerland once there.

In another departure from this year’s overriding mission, I decided to visit parts of France that were completely unknown to me: Lyon, Annecy and Chamonix. That said, I’d spent enough time in Nice that shopping for chouquettes at Carrefour or savouring a slice of flan nature at Paul were familiar enough to evoke their own feelings of nostalgia. But the highlight was to be Chamonix. I arrived on a bus from Geneva to find the town shrowded in morning mist, but shortly after the cable car began its ascent the clouds inverted and the mountains were revealed. From Aiguille du Midi, part of the Mont Blanc massif, it was possible to see France, Italy and—at a squint—Switzerland, all laid out under a bright blue sky.

Easedale, Slate Islands, Scotland

After revisiting so many far-flung and much-missed places from my childhood, it was clearer than ever I owed my parents a great deal of gratitude for such a privileged upbringing. Not that our days of travelling as a family were entirely behind us; we’d inaugurated annual autumn gatherings after the pandemic, starting with Loch Tay and continuing with Glencoe and Gardenstown. This year, we settled on Ellenabeich on the west coast of Scotland.

It was a lovely week, in which we took the ferry to the Isle of Mull for an afternoon on Tobermory and drove north to Castle Stalker on Loch Laich, but the standout experience was probably the stormy night we took the small ferry across the water to Easdale, home to the World Stone Skimming Championships. The Puffer had reopened after an extensive refurbishment by designer Banjo Beale, and we enjoyed an island-hopping nightcap before returning to Seil Island (actually connected to the mainland by road) in pitch darkness on the last crossing of the night.

Leymen, Alsace, France

Another photograph I’d found while doing a deep dive into my parents’ archive was of my brother and I posing on rollerblades outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg. In adulthood, I’d tried to visit a new Christmas market every year, and after Vienna and Salzburg in December 2023 I decided to make Strasbourg my next festive break. Or rather “we” decided; after a very drunken night at Glasgow’s Christmas offering, an old workmate and I agreed that next time we’d go away together.

As is my want, I managed to talk her into a multi-market, multi-city, multi-country extraveganza taking in Freiburg im Breisgau, Stasbourg, Basel and, at her request, Colmar. We had a glühwein at each, and a fair few beers in between, but on the last night we changed tack. She had family living just over the border from Basel, and on the last night we were collected from Switzerland and driven to a restaurant near to their home in France, in the village of Leymen. What followed was one of the most relaxed, convivial and gratifying meals in recent memory, of cordon bleu (as cheesy as the previous night’s tarte flambée) and Alsace wine, before a nightcap back at their house of Christmas beer and a tipple from the aunt’s native Cognac.

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Far from being self-indulgent and introspective, my year of nostalgia has been surprisingly sociable. I may still be a solo traveller at heart, but there is definitely something to be said for occasional shared experiences. Even the delayed school reunion proved to be a source of conversation and reconnection, as ever more ex-borders, housemasters and other staff were tracked down and added to a group chat. As memorable as these places might be, as amazing as it was to see so many of them again, it was more often than not the people that made this year most meaningful.