A Lifetime of Travel

Hello, I’m Rupert, the traveller, writer and photographer behind Just One For The Road.

Travel has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve spent more than 30 years working in the travel industry, travelled extensively around the world and collected more stories, photographs and occasional travel mishaps than I could possibly have imagined when I first started out.

Just One For The Road is where I bring all of that together.

This isn’t a website created from a desire to tick countries off a list or tell you that I’ve discovered another “hidden gem”. It’s about travelling because I genuinely love it: meeting people, exploring somewhere unfamiliar, photographing wildlife and landscapes, discovering a great local bar or restaurant and, every now and then, taking the wrong road and finding something far more interesting than the place I was looking for.

My travels have taken me from the wildlife and landscapes of Canada to the deserts of Namibia, the islands of the Indian Ocean, the cities of Europe and the extraordinary landscapes of Antarctica. More recently I’ve travelled through Vietnam, and there are always new journeys being planned.

After a lifetime connected to travel, I’m still every bit as curious about the next destination.

Where It All Began

I was born in Surrey but have spent most of my life in West Sussex. My introduction to travel came during the 1970s, when family holidays meant loading everything into the car, hitching up the caravan and heading across Europe.

We travelled to places such as Spain and what was then Yugoslavia, long before cheap flights and online booking made travelling around Europe as straightforward as it is today.

In fact, I suppose my first attempt at travel blogging happened in 1978, although nobody called it that at the time. During a family trip to Yugoslavia I started recording the journey, completely unaware that decades later I would end up doing something remarkably similar online.

When I wasn’t travelling, much of my childhood was spent outdoors. I loved sport, wildlife and anything that gave me an excuse to explore. I represented Sussex County Schools at football and rugby, while weekends often involved the local nature reserve, trips to the zoo with my Dad or watching thunderstorms from the porch while imagining rather more adventurous expeditions to places such as the Amazon.

That fascination with wildlife and the outdoors has never really disappeared.

A Life in Travel

In 1986, I left college and started my first job with Air UK, beginning what would become a career of more than three decades in the travel industry.

I spent seven years with the airline, including two years working on the ticket desk at Gatwick Airport. Travel was very different then. There were no smartphones, apps or online boarding passes, and selling someone a flight often involved considerably more paperwork than a few clicks on a screen.

By 1993 I had joined Independent Air Travel and its tour-operating division, Holiday Options. Eventually an opportunity arose that would change both my career and my relationship with travel: I moved to Corsica as a resort manager.

Living overseas gave me a completely different perspective on tourism. Rather than simply arriving somewhere for a holiday, I was working with local businesses, looking after customers and learning how a destination operated behind the scenes. In 1998 I helped establish a new company base at Figari Airport before eventually returning to the UK.

Over the following years I moved into sales and marketing, working with specialist Mediterranean destinations and becoming part of a team introducing places including Croatia and Cape Verde to a wider UK holiday market.

My own travels expanded at the same time, taking me to Egypt, Tunisia, Bosnia, Canada, the USA and many other destinations.

From Europe to the Indian Ocean

From 2010, I spent five years working in central London as Sales & Marketing Manager for Balkan Holidays, promoting destinations across Eastern and Central Europe including Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia.

I’d always wanted to work in London, and those years combined two things I loved: travel and marketing.

In 2015 I moved to Beachcomber Tours, specialising in holidays to the Indian Ocean. This opened another chapter of travel, particularly around Mauritius and the Seychelles, while also taking me to destinations including Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Morocco.

Working within travel for so many years gave me something I now appreciate enormously when writing this website. I’ve experienced the industry from both sides.

I’ve been the person going on holiday, but I’ve also been the person designing, selling and marketing holidays, working with hotels and destinations and understanding some of what happens behind the scenes.

That experience inevitably influences the way I travel and write today.

How Just One For The Road Began

Strangely enough, the beginnings of this website can probably be traced to a bar in Hong Kong in 2019.

I was travelling in the Far East for the Rugby World Cup, visiting Japan, Macau and Hong Kong, when I started writing about the trip on Facebook. The idea was simply to keep friends and family entertained with stories from the journey, including some of my observations and inevitable schoolboy errors along the way.

People seemed to enjoy reading them.

I enjoyed writing them even more.

Then, just a few months later, everything changed.

The Covid pandemic brought the travel industry to an abrupt halt, while at the same time my father became poorly and I took on caring responsibilities. After more than 30 years working in travel, life suddenly looked very different.

During that period I found myself looking back through years of photographs and remembering some of the extraordinary places I’d been fortunate enough to visit. Those memories provided a welcome escape during a difficult time and eventually gave me the idea of creating somewhere permanent to record them.

I had never built a website before, so I taught myself.

And Just One For The Road was born.

What Just One For The Road Is About Today

What started as somewhere to preserve old travel memories has gradually become something much bigger.

Today, Just One For The Road combines destination guides, personal travel stories, road trips, wildlife experiences, hotels, food, photography and practical travel information from both past and present journeys.

Some articles look back at trips taken years ago, while others are written as I travel. I regularly return to older posts to update them, add better photographs and make sure that practical information remains useful rather than allowing the website to become a collection of forgotten travel stories.

Photography has also become an increasingly important part of the site.

I’ve always enjoyed taking photographs while travelling, but over the years I’ve become much more interested in using photography to tell the story of a destination. Wildlife naturally features heavily, but I’m equally drawn to landscapes, architecture, street scenes and those unplanned moments that somehow capture the atmosphere of a place.

I don’t travel simply to produce content. I travel because I still get excited about travelling.

The website comes afterwards.

How I Like to Travel

I don’t think there is one correct way to travel.

Sometimes I love a road trip where the journey itself becomes part of the experience. At other times I’m perfectly happy checking into a great hotel, finding a comfortable bar and doing very little for a couple of days.

I enjoy cities, but I also love wildlife and the outdoors. I enjoy independent travel but have also experienced some excellent organised tours. I’ve stayed in wonderful luxury hotels and in much simpler accommodation where the location or people made the stay every bit as memorable.

Increasingly, I try not to rush.

I’ve learned that seeing more places doesn’t necessarily mean experiencing more. I’d rather have enough time to wander around a city, stop for a drink, talk to somebody or change my plans than spend an entire trip racing from one attraction to another.

And while you’ll find plenty of recommendations on Just One For The Road, I’ll also tell you when somewhere didn’t quite live up to expectations. Travel is personal, and I don’t believe every destination, hotel or experience has to be described as amazing.

Travel, Wildlife & Photography

Wildlife has fascinated me since childhood, so it isn’t surprising that some of my favourite journeys have involved animals and the natural world.

Canada, Namibia and Antarctica have provided some unforgettable wildlife experiences, while whale watching, birdlife and marine encounters frequently find their way into my travels.

Photography has become the way I preserve many of those moments.

There is something very different about waiting patiently for an animal to appear compared with photographing a city or landscape. Wildlife rarely follows the itinerary, and perhaps that’s exactly why I enjoy it.

My Photography section brings together some of my favourite images from around the world, and it is an area of Just One For The Road that I intend to continue developing.

What’s Next?

The simple answer is: hopefully plenty.

There are still enormous parts of the world I haven’t seen and places I’ve visited that I’d happily return to tomorrow.

My upcoming travels continue to give me new destinations to explore, new photographs to take and new stories to bring back to the website. Some trips are carefully planned months in advance; others develop from an idea, an invitation or simply spotting somewhere on a map and wondering what it would be like to go there.

After all these years, that’s what I still love about travel.

There is always another road to take, another place to discover and another story waiting somewhere along the way.

And if there’s a decent bar at the end of that road, even better.

Welcome to Just One For The Road.