The Importance of the Right Tea When Travelling

Tuesday 8 August 2023

This is a story of absolutely no merit unless you, as I do, like to have a decent cup of familiar tea when travelling. If so, read on. If not, move on, nothing to see here.

The somewhat challenging nature of our forthcoming Camino peregrination has led to online retail activity that seems to increase in inverse proportion to the time remaining until we’re due to depart. Starting a few weeks ago, we started acquiring Useful Things For Excessively Long Walking Holidays Travels, such as:

• Robust socks (many thanks to Ian Burley for the recommendation)
• Compact power banks, smaller and lighter than the massive one I've used before
• A rather natty luggage weighing device, needed because we have tighter than usual baggage restrictions (20kg for RyanAir, 15kg for Camino transport). Yes, I know we can do it by standing on bathroom scales and doing elementary arithmetic, but where's the fun in that?
• Spare Tevas. I don't know whether mine will stay the course and I'd rather be safe than sorry

Recently, this activity has undergone a crescendo (see? That is how to use the word properly!) as I think of more and more things that can go wrong and start to acquire stuff to address my concerns. The most urgent of these is, of course, tea. Specifically Twinings Earl Grey, which any faithful reader of my travel blog will know is practically more important to us than life itself.

On previous holidays we have taken yer normal supermarket version of this elixir, in the form of tea bags which have to be kept in ziplock bags to keep them bergamotishly fresh. However, in our recent travels to Canada and New England we were able to buy individually-wrapped string-and-tag versions, which are much better suited to the travelling tea addict in search of the finest, freshest experience. We found these in The Foreign; surely one can get 'em in England?

Accordingly, I got my trusty web browser (Ecosia, btw, which plants trees for each web search undertaken. Just so you know) to work on this not-tea problem and found several sites that promised string-and-tag Earl Grey.

Joy ensued, closely followed by an online order.

The first site seemed to be having problems delivering, so I switched to Amazon, which I normally avoid, since I prefer to put business the way of real businesses. However, Need’s Must when the Devil Drives, so Amazon it was. And this is what I found:

Lightning reflexes secured the sale, and earlier today the promised delivery arrived.

(Fragile? Teabags? WTAF?)

Upon opening, things looked good!

But then, on examining the contents, disaster!

These, while being worthy of the Twinings name, are not the packaging we're after. Disappointment ensued, followed by a rush to the browser to engineer a return. This was greeted thusly:

Bugger!

It's thus Tuesday before a Friday departure and we haven't got the right sort of tea bags!

Quel horreur! or, as I suppose I must get used to, ¡Ay qué horror!

My wife returned a measure of cheer to the gloom and despondency by doing a search of her own, which uncovered this:

accompanied, reassuringly by

So, if Amazon Do Their Thing (which they have done with all the other stuff we've ordered so far), then Disaster Is Averted.

Hope ensued.

Amazon did their stuff.

Our Camino is saved. For the moment, at least.