When holidaying now, my missing children feel like phantom limbs

Tell them we were off on a trip, and they were all: butter wouldn’t melt, and “Sing Ho! for the expedition”. On planes, trains and buses, they sat like choir boys, colouring in, or gazing out of the windows, as older passengers smiled benignly in their direction. Only occasionally did they ask: “Are we nearly there yet?”

Because parents like to kid themselves on about their children, we decided it was genetic. After all, travelling had always been our “thing”, hardwired into our DNA.

We never spent much on possessions, but poured our earnings into our adventures: interrailing in Europe; road trips across the US, a tour of the Yucatan peninsula in a convertible Volkswagen Beetle, where we had to hold the broken soft-top roof in place to protect us when a hurricane whipped itself up from nothing.

No designer dress or new-fangled gadget could compete with the thrill of unfolding a fresh road map, and imaging the landscape through which its criss-cross of highways and byways would take us.

No expensive perfume could rival the scent of cheeses in a French market, or jasmine in the Tuscan hills, or sage rising up from the Mojave desert.

We didn’t plan too much back then; just a rough route, and off we went, mostly finding (and sometimes failing to find) accommodation as we went. Pre-internet, there was less need to book ahead, and no capacity for careful cross-referencing of recent reviews. You just took your chances, and it all worked out. Or it didn’t.

Perils of wisdom

Half the joy was in the deviations, which found us joining a local barbecue in the Smoky Mountains, or night swimming as bats skimmed the surface of the water. And in the hitches, which afforded a hint of peril and good stories to tell on our return.

“You’ll never guess what happened? Mexican police officers stopped our car and searched the boot for smuggled pigs.” Once - arriving in Flagstaff on Labour Day (when, of course, all the hotels and hostels were full) - we slept in our car, rising at dawn to eat pancakes in a Wendys before heading to the Grand Canyon.

Those memories - a kaleidoscope of butterflies dancing their skittish dances around our outstretched arms; the equinox sun picking out Kukulkan’s serpent slither at Chichén Itzá - were pumped in like ballast to keep our ship steady; soaked up like rays to offset the dread chill of winter.

The summer after our first child was born, we went on our one and only package holiday: a week by a pool, in Zante. It was everything we disliked: beer and English breakfasts and party boat trips. From then on, we promised - children or no children - we’d keep on travelling our own way. Of course, with three, everything had to be planned more meticulously. No more sleeping in cars; no more drinking until sunrise and, in the early years, we didn’t stray so far from home.

But these boys - who could be uncooperative in their natural habitat - proved surprisingly adaptable once exposed to foreign climes. Like camels, they could walk miles on limited water supplies; like cacti, they could withstand temperatures of over 40 degrees.

Food-wise they were as unadventurous as west of Scotland schoolboys tend to be; but they had an insatiable appetite for new places, and could be persuaded to visit churches, ancient ruins and art galleries (so long as they were tempered by trips to a beach).

Lessons of wartime

When they were very young, the onslaught of new information produced occasional confusion, such as the time our youngest told his nursery teacher we had taken him to Hitler’s Bunker (it was a Cold War bunker under a railway station). But mostly they were sponges, taking it all in.

They were so cute, too. You’d look up and catch three heads bent over a lizard or firefly. Or three bottoms upended as they dropped stones in a river. They saved their money and everywhere we went they would traipse through the markets looking for knock-off versions of that city or country’s football top with different players’ names on the back.

As time went on - and especially as phone tech developed - our roles reversed. They began taking charge of the directions, researching the quirkiest sights and the most affordable restaurants. As our energy levels flagged, they pushed us on.

The year of our silver wedding anniversary, when I was jet-lagged and begging for a rest, they harangued and cajoled me up steep paths through the Hollowood hills. My reward? A row of horses appearing over a ridge, like a scene from Spaghetti Western.

Now they’ve grown so much they are forging their own adventures. As I write, the oldest is in Cairo, while the other two are planning trips to central America and Europe respectively, making us both proud and melancholy.

We are just back from a son-free/sonless trip to Lisbon and Porto. Shedding them has its compensations. We can get up early or sleep in as we choose; it’s cheaper and we don’t have to be so organised. We enjoy it, yet we feel their presence/absence like amputated limbs. Every time we pass a Benfica or Porto FC shop, we pause in anticipation of their clamour to go in.

Old roads travelled

The agony columnists would doubtless say: “Time to rediscover yourselves,” but our old selves no longer exist. We are so much older we have to take photographs of the map and zoom in on our phones to be able to make out the names of the roads. It’s spiritual as much as physical: we have been changed forever by the forces of nature we brought into the world.

We’re still curious; still excited by new sights and sounds, our minds expanded by having seen so many places through our children’s eyes as well as our own. We marvel at the shapes the columns and arches of Lisbon’s ruined convent make against the cerulean blue of a cloudless sky. We drink cherry brandy from the kiosks and doorways in Alfama.

We find a restaurant where locals sing fado and fall in love with the tiny lady with the shiny earrings and sandpaper voice, who blows kisses to the diners like she’s Edith Piaf. I come to accept that my knees are knackered, yet I am thrawn enough to regard it as a challenge: to walk further; climb higher.

We are riding the old Tram 28 through streets so narrow it has to breathe in when we see them: three boys with knapsacks and caps and faces agog, and for a moment neither of us can speak. We have had so much fun. We will have more. But will there ever be a time when such a sight does not upend us? More as I learn it.