In the UK we’re in the midst of a four day Bank Holiday weekend to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, sixty years on the throne. A lot has happened in those past sixty years, not least of which is a ton of travelling. Now, most of us are thrilled to travel overseas but it is unlikely that even the hardiest of adventurers among us has covered quite as much ground as the Queen since 1953. Since then she has undertaken over two hundred and sixty one overseas trips to one hundred and sixteeen diffrent nations. Many of those trips were pretty mammoth in scale. In fact, in the first tour of the Commonweath as reigning monarch, she clocked up a highly impressive forty three thousand miles! And that’s on just one journey alone!
Someone with presumably too much time on their hands has also worked out that on each of those journeys overseas the Royal entourage carries with it over six tons of baggage – that’s one heck of a visit to duty free!
And it should be remembered that not all Royal travel overseas is undertaken by air. Before it was decommisioned to become a tourist attraction in Edinburgh, the Royal Yacht Britannia was used by many a royal party for more sedate voyages, both around the coast of Great Britain and overseas. Again, the statisticians among us have estimated that from nineteen fifty four when the first such journey took place, till it was last used in nineteen ninety seven, the Queen racked up over a million miles on board the vessel.
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