MY sons were born travellers. That’s not a boast; it’s a fact. At home, I often struggled to get them breakfasted and out the door of a morning.

After school, they’d squabble and trip each other up while I was making dinner. But put three small knapsacks on their backs, and three small caps on their three small heads, and - ta da! - we were transformed into (half of the) von Trapps ready to Climb Ev’ry Mountain.

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,........

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