Around the world in (almost) 80 days

Early in my life, I learned how much fun it is to travel. I’ve decided that a love for travel must be a genetic condition; my mom and dad both loved to travel.

When I was a child, our family took summer vacations by automobile (before the interstate system), and by the time I was a teenager I had been in all of the lower 48 states.

I first had the opportunity to travel outside of the United States when, as an 18-year-old ROTC midshipman, I spent six weeks on the USS Macon sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, to São Paulo, Brazil, with stops in Barbados and Cuba. Four years later, as a US Marine Lieutenant, I traveled (at government expense) to Hawaii, Wake Island, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines and Hong Kong. These journeys were not luxurious, but they were certainly informative.

After becoming a civilian and a married man, I lived with my wife, Dorothy, in Chicago and we took vacations to Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe. After retiring from our careers, we added South America, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Antarctica and Russia (Vladivostok to Moscow) to our list of travels.

Over the past 25 years, we’ve been on all seven continents and have been on trains (our favorite mode of travel) on the six continents that have trains.

In 2015, as we approached our 60th wedding anniversary, we began thinking about an appropriate trip to celebrate that event. We remembered the fun movie “Around the World in 80 Days,” which was released in 1956, the year we were married. Wouldn’t it be fun to go around the world in 80 days (largely by trains) in the spring of 2016?

So we began planning our March 5-May 15, 2016, trip. I booked our train tickets online, but to book our train tickets in China I worked with China DIY Travel (6 Chaoyang Park South Rd., Beijing; phone +86 13601317339, www.china-diy-travel.com). China DIY Travel sent us vouchers, which we used to pick up the tickets at the various stations.

For our Russian train tickets, I worked with Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railways (Harbour Station, Porthmadog, Gwynedd, Wales, LL49 9NF, U.K.; phone +44 01766 516024, www.festrail.co.uk). They mailed our tickets to us.

My wife and I believe there are three phases of travel, all equally enjoyable:

1. Planning the trip and acting as our own travel agents (determining the places we’ll visit and then booking our tickets and our accommodations).

2. Actually making the trip.

3. Creating an album about the trip and, from time to time, reviewing the album.

Usually, I do most of the work with phase one, while my wife is typically responsible for the third phase.

Our around-the-world trip had four segments: crossing the Atlantic by air, crossing Europe and Asia by train, crossing the Pacific by ship, and crossing the United States by train.

Originally, we thought we’d travel from east to west, but we found this to be impractical because of the time involved going from the West Coast to Asia. Cruises heading west tend to be quite long.

So we booked from west to east — a flight to Europe, trains across Europe and Asia, a relatively short cruise across the northern Pacific and, finally, trains across the US.

More specifically, this was our route: From Raleigh to Atlanta and Amsterdam by plane; to Paris, Cologne, Berlin and Warsaw on day trains; from Warsaw to Moscow by sleeper train; from Moscow to Beijing by sleepers on the weekly Trans-Siberian/Trans-Mongolian Railroad; by day train from Beijing to Xi’an; another sleeper from Xi’an to Chengdu; a day train to Shanghai; a flight to Tokyo; a Crystal Serenity cruise to San Francisco via Russia, Alaska and Canada; the Zephyr sleeper to Chicago; the Capitol sleeper to Washington, DC, and the Carolinian to Cary.

In most of Europe and in all of Asia, we saw no luggage carts or porters, and in China, the huge train stations had several floors but no elevators. We found the trains in China to be quite good, but, for us, the ticketing process there was next to impossible.  

This 70-day, 25,600-mile trip turned out to be a real endurance test for two octogenarians, and we don’t plan to repeat it soon, but it was great fun. I was gimping around on a 4-wheel walker because of my bad back, but it doubled as our luggage cart.

If anyone wants more information, write me at wjohnswartz@gmail.com.

W. JOHN SWARTZ

Pittsboro, NC