A carnet de voyage is French for, well, a travelogue would probably be the most appropriate expression in English. In the past, I’ve done quite a bit of travelling, either on business or as a result of being someplace due to business that made non-work travel easy. Not that I’m as well travelled as my friend Mark (a.k.a. Buoyguy) who regularly racks up gazillions of miles as he plies his trade around the globe. His carnet de voyage is far more exotic than mine, but nevertheless I will occasionally post something here under the category.
I haven’t been doing much travel since returning to live in Canada after a stint working and living in France for a few years around the beginning of the present century, but events have recently meant having to fly a number of times in the past month. Things have changed so much in air travel – mainly the tightened security and airlines that are scratching to make a profit by charging for all sorts of things one used to take for granted as part of the deal. I won’t complain about it, there’s not much point – it is what it is, and it’s not likely to backtrack.
The most recent set of flights went fairly uneventfully (nothing got cancelled at the last minute due to equipment problems, which happened to me with a flight a few weeks back – the airline was good enough to put me up in a hotel since the next flight out was not until the following morning) – other than some worried moments about making connecting flights (twice I arrived at the gate with boarding already in progress) – but there was one interesting thing that happened yesterday: one of the passengers on the flight from San Francisco to Chicago was Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister of the UK.