Putting Travel Delays Into Perspective

It never ceases to amaze me how folks were able to travel great distances before the advent of modern transportation.

Reading about some of these travels puts things into perspective.

In 1910, Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia Woolf), her husband, her future lover, and a mathematician traveled to Asia Minor: Constantinople and beyond. From Constantinople, they set out of Bursa, Anatolia. They reached Bursa by taking a long, slow boat voyage across the Sea of Marmora, and then completed the journey by train, one can hardly imagine how rickety. But they got there. Soon after arriving, Vanessa suffered a miscarriage (she was unaware that she was pregnant when she started the journey), became bedridden, and was provided medical care by her painter-friend Roger Fry.

When her sister Virginia, back in London, heard of her sister's illness, she panicked. She had lost her beloved brother Thoby to typhus in a 1906 journey to Greece, and she feared she was now going to lose her sister.

Virginia, as Leon Edel writes, "in a show of energ -- and a touch of panic -- rushed across the Continent until she reached Brusa. (It is now known as Bursa for those looking it up on google maps.)

They took the Orient Express back home; Vanessa survived.

But can you imagine Virginia Woolf in 1910 taking a train from London, a ferry across the channel, the Orient Express across the Alps, through the Slavic countries, and then to Constantinople. That would have been the easy part. Now she had to do the same as her sister had done earlier: find a boat to take her across the Sea of Marmora and then a rickety train to Bursa.

I personally find it quite incredible.

It certainly puts things into perspective when I read about travelers stranded in airports due to snowstorms. Stranded in airports, with their smartphones, their iPads, their Starbucks coffee, and food courts.

(The story is told in Leon Edel's Bloomsbury: The House of Lions.)