Sean Thomas

What I learnt on my grown-up gap year

I did the things an 18-year-old might do – with the wisdom and weariness of a 58-year-old

  • From Spectator Life
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Earlier this year, quite unexpectedly (and for personal reasons too tedious to share), I was forced to be outside the UK for ‘a while’. At the outset, I had no idea how long my exile might be: maybe weeks, maybe months. To add to the ambiguity, I had no particular place to go, except two already arranged travel writing trips of a week each (in the USA and Greece).

So I decided: why not make a pleasing virtue of necessity? Why not, at the age of 58, do a geriatric version of a gap year, wandering freely about the globe? And that is exactly what I did. I packed my suitcase, headed out, and let whimsy and the weather dictate where I went next. Some days on my odyssey I would wake up, decide to go to a different country, and get on a plane, train or boat that same afternoon.

First I flew from London to Nashville, where I hired a car and drove down the Deep South’s magnificently linear national park, the Natchez Trace, which winds through the drowsy greenery of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi – via vast hickory forests, immensely lush riverscapes and sobering slave markets. Two million slaves were forcibly walked down the Trace in the mid 19th century, a fact almost everyone around the Trace wants to forget.

I visited some phenomenal burger and barbecue joints. I got tipsy with hilarious Rhode Islanders running quaint hotels in Linden, Tennessee; I got squiffy with the good PR ladies of Jackson, Ridgeland and Tupelo, Mississippi, where I saw Elvis’s shack of a birthplace, plus his church, school, bathing spot and outhouse.

The US leg of my jaunt finished in New Orleans, the most pleasurable city in the Americas. Until then I’d been worried about what travelling would be like, post-Covid – but the evening I arrived I walked into a shop on my way to a Bourbon Street oyster bar and saw a phenomenally tall sixty-something man buying prosecco in lilac shorts, knee-high black socks and a ‘Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump’ T-shirt, while yanking two impossibly cute rescue dogs to his heels.

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