April 14th - The Joys Of Going Against The Flow
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The great Easter getaway is most definitely on. I've been to hubs across the capital today to witness for myself the scenes of queues and hordes of people trying to get to their destinations. It all reminds me of the pleasure of travelling when most others aren't. In this episode I take you through when it might be best to visit, particularly Italy - when and where it might be the best time to get some of the world's most beautiful attractions to yourself.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and thank you for joining me, Simon Calder, for today's travel podcast, brought to you by the Independent. |
| 0:10.4 | And today, I want to sing the praises of travelling when other people don't. |
| 0:16.8 | I know it sounds much easier to say than it is to do because an awful lot of people have good reasons for having to travel, for example, over the Easter weekend, because they have sensible Monday to Friday jobs, or they have school-aged children, or they have other responsibilities that mean that they have to comply with the fortunate great rush. |
| 0:42.0 | I've been out and about today to various mainline stations around London, also to Heathrow Airport. |
| 0:50.2 | And goodness me, I have never seen cuesues, such as I saw at Eurostar, since the last really big |
| 0:59.8 | Eurostar disruption. Hundreds of people, queues moving fairly swiftly, people I talked to said, |
| 1:06.1 | yeah, we've been in the queue about an hour, our trains in about 45 minutes, so we'll probably |
| 1:10.2 | be all right. |
| 1:11.1 | They were hauling people out of the queues. But that just shows at a time when you have got |
| 1:17.1 | the biggest getaway for a couple of years, what strains and stresses the system is under |
| 1:24.5 | a subject which I have discussed at some length. |
| 1:29.1 | But if you can possibly go against the tide and travel at times when everybody is kind of going the other way, |
| 1:38.2 | then you are guaranteed to have an easier adventure. |
| 1:44.0 | So, for example, I flew out to Italy for my trip this week on Saturday |
| 1:49.5 | evening. I chose that because it is a really calm and quiet time to fly. Yes, while Saturday mornings, |
| 1:59.3 | right through to lunchtime tend to be very busy by tea time, actually, most people have got where they need to be. I managed to pick up a one-way ticket on British Airways out to Milan for £80, looking not too, looking not too far ahead. So that was, I thought, a pretty good deal. And I got in while the flight |
| 2:19.9 | was an hour late, but even so I still got in to my hotel by midnight and everything was good. |
| 2:27.6 | It's interesting, talking of Italy, to see just how many people were out and about on Sunday. |
| 2:33.5 | The whole place was absolutely packed with people wanting to enjoy themselves. |
| 2:39.0 | So by Monday things had calmed down and I'm now actively seeking out mid-week journeys |
| 2:45.7 | because the old idea, oh, let's go to Venice or Florence or Rome for a weekend. Well, you are just |
| 2:53.2 | asking for trouble at the moment because guess what? Italians who've endured, like we have, |
... |
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