Caroline O’ Donoghue has found her mid-thirties travels are a far cry from holidays with friends when she was younger
I’M CURRENTLY ON a month-long interrailing trip with one of my best friends, Jen. The nature of the trip – living out of backpacks, staying in hostels, existing on mostly street food and pilfered items from breakfast buffets – has prompted quite a few questions from our friends and acquaintances.
The questions, in order of frequency : how are you affording this? (By saving.) How are you managing this with work? (I’m selfemployed ; Jen has juggled her annual leave with a month that has a lot of bank holidays in it.) Don’t your partners mind? (No.)
But while the questions are many, the implication is often singular. It can be boiled down to: aren’t you guys, so firmly in your mid-thirties, a bit old for this?
I would argue that we are the exact right age for this. I did a similar kind of trip with two friends in my early twenties and neither friendship survived. If you’re going to be living out of a backpack with someone, taking trains, ferries, buses and trams with them across mainland Europe, it’s not just OK to be in your mid-thirties or older, it’s essential. You need a credit card. You need experience and a really deep sense of what is worth doing (hiring a boat to row across Lake Bled!) and what is obviously a trap (an Instagrammable ice cream for €11). Above all, though, you need to be able to communicate what you do and don’t want to do without fear of judgement. And, by 30, everyone is capable of this.
This is not to say that the girls’ trips you take in your twenties, thirties or forties have a clear winner or loser. Each has a different spirit. I loved some of my twenties girls’ trips and have polled my 40-something friends to find out what those vacations are like.
20s
Where you’re going: Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest.
Why you’re going: You’re two years into your first office job and it sucks. Your rent is insane; your flatmates are in a civil war over air-fryer ownership. You’re beginning to wonder whether the glamorous, sexy decade you were promised was all just a lie invented by advertising agencies to sell jeans.
What you’re doing: Generic sightseeing, featuring a museum about an atrocity that occurred during the last century. By the evening you are crushingly aware of how fleeting life is and raring to get fucked up. You get let into a nightclub for free, which vastly overstretches your confidence for the night. You are resplendent in Boohoo. There’s a run-in with some creepy guys, which you escape; another run-in with a hot guy who you disappear with. Everyone acts ‘concerned’ that they can’t find you and gives you the thi
