Travel

Before I joined Derann in 1975 the furthest I’d ever travelled was to the Isle of Wight, and that was a one day coach trip! My father wasn’t very adventurous and for most of my life I’d spent my holidays along with my family….in either Weymouth, in Dorset or Blue Anchor Bay, a small resort not far from Minehead. However at Derann that had quickly changed and over the next ten years with many new and exciting destinations. We travelled to Holland to visit one of our first trade dealers abroad, J W Gransma whose office was in Haarlem, Amsterdam. There were meetings in Bochum at the offices of Marketing Film with Manfred Menz and several stays in Cologne or Dusseldorf, when we visited or exhibited at Photokina. We also had similar experiences at Cannes for both The Film Festival and Video Markets and at Mifed in Milan. The video cassette market had meant a number of business trips to the USA, both on the East and West Coasts for meetings with our film agents and to visit the AFM. On one of these trips cult film director Pete Walker, who was a good friend of Dereks, had loaned us one of his cars and we were able to turn a couple of the days into some excellent sight seeing. My business trips to the States whet my appetite to see more and a two week tour was booked for my mother and myself, in L.A. and San Francisco in 1980, in the hopes that it would take her mind off dads death of the year before. We did and saw all the usual things, but my mom never forgot Yosemite. In 1982 we toured Italy, mom loved this tour, with it’s many basilicas and the cappuccino, which was the only Italian word she ever picked up. The following year it was the East Coast of America, a tour starting in New York and working it’s way down to Miami. I made sure mom remembered New York with a breath-taking helicopter ride and a Broadway show (a revival of Mame with Angela Lansbury!). In 1986 I took a tour of Morocco, which took in seven towns including Marrakesh and the concrete monstrosity that calls itself Casablanca, this was the first holiday I’d taken on my own and I was a little worried to start with, but by the time it had finished I’d made many new friends and had really enjoyed it. 1987 it was Egypt with a tour and Nile cruise and at a time you were still able to climb on the outside of the Great Pyramid, it was a fantastic place. 1989 saw me in Austria, 1990 it was Athens, Greece, and two years later found me in Turkey, at Olu Deniz with trips to Pamukkale and Ephesus. From 1996 till 2008 I toured France by car, I don’t drive myself, but my partner and travelling companion Graham is a patient and careful driver and we had many wonderful holidays over there, choosing a different area every year. in 2014 it was Japan, however I’ll cover that in a later post. You’ll find other photos in the albums to most of the holidays.