Oz Trip Part 1

We've just returned from a 3 week holiday in Australia. It was great. We managed to cram in a lot of sightseeing and even got to meet several of our relatives. We loved it....except for those interminable plane flights there and back! Urghh!! Why do people think of air travel as quick and convenient?! Hours spent driving to the airport, sitting around waiting for the flight, the flight itself, and all that mucking about with baggage, passports and security. Door-to-door from our Sydney motel to our home was 32 boring, sleep deprived, hours. Hoorah for modern living...

Anyway, to the point of this posting: What am I going to do about our carbon footprint? 4 people on a return trip to Oz equals a 23.5 tonne footprint. Or, about 3 times our normal annual footprint.

So I've decided to 'offset' the flights i.e. Pay to have the footprint balanced out by stuff like tree planting. It'll cost about £180 but that's just a fraction of the total cost of the holiday. So why not?

Reducing CO2 Emissions on Holiday

I don't know about you but holidays always present me with a dilema where carbon emissions are concerned. These days it's fairly standard for people to look for ever more exotic places to go to each year. Partly for the thrill, partly so they can boast about it when they get back. Holidays in your home country are sooo last century!

But, when you consider that a long-haul return flight can add up to 20 tonnes to your annual carbon footprint, it makes you think.

So we've worked out a bunch of rules for our family holidays. Maybe you'll find them of some use yourself:

• Take the majority of holidays in the UK. Our country is beautiful and you can never run out of new places to visit. Over recent years we've done Devon, the Isle of Wight, Yorkshire, the west of Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland. All of them were wonderful places to stay and we were supporting our own tourist industry.
• Something Different? Drive there. L iving in the south-east makes it easy to reach much of western Europe by car. We've visited France, Spain, and even Italy that way, making the journey part of the holiday with stop-overs in interesting places.
• Too far to drive? Try a train. We've not actually done this one yet but it is possible to get a lot further afield by train and hire a car at the other end. Here's one of several websites that help you sort these sort of trips out. One classic break by rail is a 'snow train' for ski holidays (See here for an example). The holiday starts the moment you get on the train!
• Must fly? Make it as short as possible and carbon offset the flight. We try to keep the flights to a minimum (3 in the last decade) and close at hand (none out of Europe). Yes, there's a whole exotic world out there beyond Europe but it's pretty cool on our continent too. So much history, so many sights, & so much natural beauty. And, compared to the price a flight, carbon offseting the trip is small potatoes.