What kind of parent would plan out their children’s lives in every detail from the get-go?

Reflecting on a recent holiday, Veronica Zundel considers how it mirrored life’s unexpected turns.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”, wrote that famous author Someone-or-Other. Me, I prefer to arrive. The journey is part of the experience, certainly – it may even be part of the holiday – but the destination is surely the object. That’s why it wasn’t at all welcome the week before last when our Eurostar train was delayed by an hour and 40 minutes, which meant we missed our sleeper connection from Brussels to Vienna by a frustrating five minutes.

We had to find a hotel in Brussels for the night and a flight for three of us to Vienna the next morning, at eye-watering cost (the alternative would have been a ten-hour train journey with a change, effectively cancelling 20 per cent of our five-day holiday).

Not only all that, but, when we arrived in Vienna, it rained steadily and often heavily for three out of the five days we were there. We still managed to have a good time, mostly thanks to liberal helpings of Wiener Schnitzel and cream cakes, as well as seeing my nearest relation twice – but it wasn’t quite what we anticipated, especially in May.

To add insult to injury, it turns out the Eurostar travel insurance only covers delays of three hours or more, and expires the moment you get home, so that you have to claim while you’re still on holiday. Fortunately we had other insurances, one of which even turned out to be still valid.

This is a time of year when many of us are ‘going away’, whether we think of ourselves as holiday-makers, tourists or intrepid explorers. Whether we are flying, Inter-railing, camping or staying in a five-star hotel, tramping cities or slumping on the beach, we will have a vision in our minds of how our precious time of refreshment and relaxation is going to look. Reality, sadly, often doesn’t match up – and there is no family row to equal a family row on a stressful journey!