Six travel experiences millennials will never understand

Being a traveller under 35 is terrific. It means you can scurry up Mont Blanc like a marmot, give the local people useful advice on gender-neutral beards, and save the planet with a daffodil-based diet. But it also means you’ve missed out on – especially – European travel experiences which spiced the youth of your elders. Such as:

Smoking on planes

This truly paid off during turbulence, with the third glass of scotch or, frankly, as soon as the little no-smoking light went out. (I never understood, incidentally, why you couldn’t smoke during take-off and landing, the tensest moments. A test of character, doubtless.)

Cigarettes were confined to the back of the plane – from about row 25 – on the sound scientific principle that, at 27,000 feet, smoke couldn’t possibly drift forward to row 24, annoying other passengers. So everyone was happy. At least, I was.

No security checks at airports

Those of advanced years will recall halcyon times when you weren’t obliged to hold your trousers up because the belt was in a tray, could keep your shoes on and toothpaste secret, and weren’t subject to the whims of personnel whose combined IQ wouldn’t out-gun a shoal of tuna. (“You pack this yourself, sir?” “No, I employ a team of elves.”)

Back then you’d wander through customs and, so long as you weren’t actually toting a syringe or a Luger, generally went untroubled. People were more relaxed. Years ago, I accompanied an elderly French lady, and novice flyer, to Manchester Airport, bade her farewell at passport control, and next spotted her wandering alone outside on the apron, looking up at parked planes. She assumed that, like buses, they’d have their destinations marked on the front. These days, she’d be tasered, spread-eagled and otherwise treated in that unseemly manner affected by rapid intervention forces.

Hitch-hiking

There was a time when youth - squaddies through students and other unemployables - gathered in droves outside towns and on motorway slip-roads. Flights cost a year’s rent (not, as now, the price of a sandwich), trains were restrictive and only two of my peer group could afford cars: one dealt in drugs, the other in home furnishings. The rest of us raised thumbs and chucked ourselves upon the hazards of life.

Hitch-hiking carted us round the continent for free in the company of people who invariably opened up about their wives, mistresses, dreams and deceptions precisely because they were never going to see us again.

Postcards

Back then you had four lines on one postcard per trip. This has evolved into 1,000-word daily blogs, hourly posts on Facebook and 173 Instagram pictures of a sea-food dinner in Biarritz. Unless you’re Eric Newby, Jonathan Raban or Bill Bryson – which you aren’t, or you’d treat Instagram like cholera – we truly don’t need to know that much. Four lines was just right.

Paper maps

Was there any satisfaction more intense than unfolding vast maps, plotting a route along byways from Bristol, and navigating successfully to Brindisi? Of course there was, but map-reading was still pretty good. You’d achieved something in the manner in which people had been winning wars, discovering lost tribes and carting silk across the planet for millennia. Granted, you occasionally ended up missing a sight, city or entire country (OK, Andorra – but still) and thus wishing to exchange your navigational partner for a stick of rock. But the compensations were many, and Andorra’s not that hot, anyway. The lady in the GPS obviates all this, thus shrinking our brains and requiring that we argue about smething else.

High street travel agents

Oh, the joys of going, ignorant, into the travel agency, scanning brochures full of blue, throwing yourself upon the good offices of the invariably attractive person behind the desk and emerging with a holiday booked. Compare and contrast today’s slog through numberless airline, hotel and villa websites, 436 review and comparison sites and 37 different ways of booking which leave you quivering with caffeine and indecision as the cock crows at 4am. Then, on arrival in the Algarve, it immediately becomes clear that the villa you booked doesn’t exist.