Environmental Guilt

To be truthful, there is a small part of me that says we really shouldn't be making this trip at all - for environmental reasons. I have heard from a number of sources that air travel is the most harmful to the earth's atmosphere of any human activity, and it certainly uses up large amounts of fuel resources. We have just started a new group at our church called Stewards of Creation which has as its focus to become better caretakers of God's Creation. So for us to take this trip at this time seems a bit hypocritical. However my environmental guilt has not been so strong as to make us cancel our plans, and there have been some choices made about how we travel in Europe that were partially based on environmental considerations. We have decided that we would mainly use public transport while in Europe - meaning trains, buses and ferries. Because Europe has a much better public transport infrastructure than here, we are not really hampered by limiting ourselves in this way at all. So far we are able to get to pretty much everywhere we want to using those three forms of transportation. The only exception may be in northern Denmark, where we may have to rent a car to visit Bindslev, the ancestral home of my Grandmother's family.

We were given the option of flying from England to Norway or Denmark, but Beth and I chose to take a ferry instead (the one pictured above). One consideration was cost as it is somewhat cheaper to take the ferry. Another consideration was that by taking a berth on the ferry we are actually combining costs of both transportation and accommodation - basically it is costing us pretty well the same price to take the ferry to Denmark as it would to stay in a hotel (even a budget priced hotel) in London. So for the same price, not only to we get a place to stay the night, but we get from one place to another. We are planning to do a similar thing when going to Iona - we will travel to this part of Scotland on the Caledonian Sleeper, leaving London in the evening and arriving in Glasgow in the early morning - once again getting both travel and accommodation for about the same price as a hotel room in London. The trade off is time of travel - it takes much longer to travel by ferry or train than to fly. On the other hand, we will see more from the windows of the train, or the deck of a ferry, than flying high above the clouds. So when all these considerations are combined with understanding that travelling by train, ferry and bus is less harmful to the environment - then it becomes an obvious choice to use those forms of transportation while in Europe.

The means of travel we will be using while in Europe is quite varied: Trains, both standard and high speed versions, including taking a train through the Chunnel from France to England; Ferries, both big and small; Buses, mostly while on our package tour; Cars, mostly while travelling with relatives in Norway; Subways, while sight-seeing in the larger centres; and walking, lots of walking. We are picking hotels, hostels, and Bed & Breakfasts with an eye on how close to the train station they are. So far we shouldn't have to call a taxi once for getting to and from the Train Stations. Recently I've been trying to do regular time on the treadmill to get in shape for all this trekking around on foot we hope to be doing. I'd rather be going for walks outside, but the weather has not been cooperating!

Beth's passport came today, so we were able to book our ferry trip from England to Denmark. So now more of our itinerary gets set in place. We also managed to use some Air Miles to book a hotel in Milan. We are arriving in Italy a few days before the package tour starts, this was so we could take in an opera. After doing much looking around we decided on an opera at one of the most famous Opera Houses in the world - La Scala in Milan. We'll write about that in more detail one day, but for now I'm just glad that we have a place to stay while in that city. Believe it or not, Milan was not on the itinerary of our package tour, so making this side trip will be covering an area we would have missed otherwise.

So I feel better now that I've confessed my environmental guilt. I also remind myself that this is a once in a lifetime trip, and there is a good chance we will never travel to Europe like this again. Thus I will enjoy the trip, and put my environmental concerns to work around here, giving me the impetus to change the ways I regularly impact the environment. In the end that will have a much bigger impact any ways.