The little trips we forget to count

There comes a point during university when Instagram starts to feel like a very personal attack.

Someone is in Barcelona. Someone else has just come back from Amsterdam. Somebody you vaguely remember from first year is apparently island-hopping around Greece. Meanwhile, you are sitting in your room with an assignment due tomorrow, three graduate-job applications open in separate tabs, and a bank balance you have decided not to look at until payday.

Travel can quietly become another item on the unofficial university checklist: go somewhere beautiful, take the picture, post the picture, and repeat

University has a funny way of making everyone look like they are living the same life, when, in reality, we are all on completely different timelines. For some, summer means a suitcase, a boarding pass, and a suspicious number of sunset pictures. For others, it means an internship, a dissertation, a part-time job, a society tour, going home, or trying to stretch their student budget until it gives up.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, you scroll past another holiday photo and think: “Should I be travelling more?”

I know I have. Not necessarily because I desperately wanted to be in Montenegro, but because everyone else seemed to be there. There is a difference.

Travel can quietly become another item on the unofficial university checklist: go somewhere beautiful, take the picture, post the picture, and repeat.

In this way, university is slightly unfortunate, because I actually love travelling. I love the anticipation of a journey, the ridiculous amount of snacks bought for a two-hour train ride, and the first glimpse of somewhere unfamiliar. I even enjoy the brief delusion that I know exactly where I am going, moments before Google Maps tells me I have been walking in the wrong direction for eight minutes.

But some of my favourite escapes from university have been much closer to home.

Leamington Spa is even less of a ‘trip’, which may be exactly why I like it. Sometimes you do not need a holiday. You need to leave your room

Take Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s close enough to Warwick that you can get there without the trip becoming a military operation, but different enough to make the usual university routine feel pleasantly far away. There is the river, the old buildings, the little shops, people wandering around with cameras, and that particular feeling you get when you have nowhere you urgently need to be.

You can walk until your feet hurt, stop for coffee, look at the river for no particular reason, and suddenly realise you have not checked your university email inbox in three hours.

Leamington Spa is even less of a ‘trip’, which may be exactly why I like it. Sometimes you do not need a holiday. You need to leave your room.

Nothing particularly dramatic happens: taking a walk through town; finding somewhere to eat; buying a coffee that you absolutely did not need; shopping a little; or simply sitting in the Pump Room Gardens, watching people going about their days. These small things are what make it rather nice though.

Then there is Cardiff, which feels a little more like you have actually gone somewhere. The train journey gives you enough time to stare out of the window, listen to music, and eat the snacks you bought five minutes before boarding. By the time you arrive, the campus bubble feels a little further away.

You wander around a new city, take a wrong turn, find somewhere you like, and decide to stay. You take photos: some good, some blurry, and most completely unnecessary. You eat something you did not plan to eat. You walk more than you expected to. Eventually, you get back on the train, tired in that satisfying way that has nothing to do with deadlines.

None of this is particularly glamorous. And perhaps that is what I like about it.

Because when you spend enough time looking at everyone else’s holidays, it is easy to forget that most of the best parts of travelling are not particularly photogenic anyway

I of course still want to do the big trips. If someone offered me a week in Greece tomorrow, I would not exactly begin by checking train times to Stratford-upon-Avon. But there is something freeing about not needing every trip to be the trip.

Maybe a good day does not need a boarding pass. Maybe it just needs a train ticket, and somewhere you have not been before, because when you spend enough time looking at everyone else’s holidays, it is easy to forget that most of the best parts of travelling are not particularly photogenic anyway: the terrible joke your friend makes on the train, the coffee you spill, the street you wander down because it looks interesting, or the sunset you notice five minutes after you put your phone away.

Those are the bits that stay.

And maybe, somewhere between the flights we are saving for, and the places sitting patiently on our bucket lists, we should count these little trips too.

Not because they are a substitute for the big ones.

Just because they happened.

And you were there.