Definitely more thought and preparation nowadays - currency risks, strikes, terrorism....and now Trump!!!

I've always been cautious about where I travel to. Have always checked health care for example. I'm not very brave. I have hitch hiked from my home town to Chamonix though, but would always research a new holiday destination.

There's a tale to our Chamonix trip. We were not far from our destination & received a lift from a tiny Chinese gentleman who was driving this huge car & he could barely see over the steering wheel. Whilst negotiating some hairy bends up the mountainside, he kept turning round to talk to us!!! I've never been so relieved to get out of a car!

I've never had the desire to travel too far & places like Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey (having tried Turkey many years ago) these are places that I (we) would never ever consider, even before Isis existed.

I've been going to Spain since the 1970's, my first flight on a Dan Air plane, apptly referred to as Dan Dare, and at times when the Basque separatists (ETA) were very active......Initially ETA were blowing up government targets, such as army barracks and police stations, and unless you were unfortunate to be around the government targets, as a tourist you didn't feel connected to it.

Then they changed their tactics to try and achieve their objective and they started targeting the tourists by planting bombs in the tourist areas along the coast in hotels and airports, to try and bring the Spanish tourist industry down and impoverish the country and subsequently damage the government .
They planted bombs where the tourists went, in Benidorm, Fuengirola, Cambrils (Salou) and in Reus airport...as well as in Madrid, killing 21 innocent shoppers in a supermarket.

When the bomb went off in Reus Airport in 1996 injuring British tourists , it really brought the situation 'home' to us on a personal level, as we had been sat in that departure lounge while waiting for our Thomson flight back to Manchester, less than a week earlier after having 2 weeks in Salou. We switched our holidays to Greece, to Rhodes, Lindos and Polichrono for a few years. So yes, eventually it did make us abandon anywhere in Spain & islands.

For as long as I can remember there have been threats from Islam to take back Andalusia (Al-Andalus), now the threats have got louder.

Things changed in Spain when ETA killed one person too many. They abducted and murdered a young 23 year old politician, who nobody had really heard off (apart from the locals), but all of a sudden people related to him, he could have been their husband, son, brother or nephew and they took to the streets nationwide in their millions upon millions.
People who had been intimidated and silent for years, they suddenly found the strength to speak up. ETA had lost their cause, not by the actions of several governments, but by people power.

I recognise similarities between ETA and ISIS, both bombing to kill the tourist industry, to make people poor and they become easier to (radicalise) recruit.....the difference being that ETA never had a religious ideology that wanted to take over the world, they just wanted their independence from Spain.
I don't know how you can fight an ideology that's spreading around the globe like a cancer.......times have indeed changed and self preservation has to come first now.

Sanji x

Starting to take holidays much closer to home over the last few years has coincided with me becoming more cautious on where I'm booking . I really liked Tunisia on my one visit a few years ago and thought that I would return, I thought it would be a place that OH would like and we could visit the country together, but along with Egypt, another country I enjoyed on my previous visits I wouldn't attempt a visit now.
So a couple of years ago we returned to the Greek Islands after a break of almost 40years and will be returning to Crete and a first visit to Rhodes this year. Last year we visited both Tenerife and Mallorca again after a long break. I may even visit the Spanish mainland, it's 49 years since we were both last there, we drove down from the UK and spent a couple of weeks visiting the various coastal resorts and cities and ended up in Benidorm. My first visit to Spain was in 1964 on a 19guinea 9 day trip to Calella. All of these places I feel comfortable in though of course these days nowhere is really safe.

I did actually change a holiday a few years ago. We had booked to go to Goa but I just couldn't shake this feeling that something bad was going to happen. And there were news articles about Goa possibly being a target. In the end we changed the destination to Cape Town( had used airmiles so it was easy to change) We then came across an armed robbery and a shoot out!!

We have been to the same campsite in France every year since 2010 apart from 2012 when diary restrictions made it impossible for us (driving 750 miles each way for a 10 day holiday just wasn't worth it). I have rebooked for this year but I can't get the time off work at the time we normally go (and when all our friends from previous years will be there) but we haven't told the children that we have booked. I booked so that we could get the early booking discount and the ferry crossings that we wanted (the end of the holiday is into English and French peak holidays - we are in Scotland so our holidays start earlier) but we may yet decide to do something different; one of the children isn't happy because the usual friends won't be there when we will. Our difficulty is that we can't think of anything different to do that isn't going to cost us so much more than this campsite is costing us.

We arrived in France on 24th June 2016 on an overnight ferry and found the attitude to the British during the holiday very different from our previous trips (the Union Flag was taken down in the local town seafront while we were there). We didn't feel threatened in any way but it was uncomfortable.

In Feb 2003, hubby and I flew out of Heathrow to New York, having left our 2 year old at home with grandparents. This was the eve of the Iraq war and our take-off was almost vertical, with the runway protected by the armed forces. I'm not sure that I would have travelled had I known the threat we were under and then we got stuck in New York because 2 feet of snow fell the night before we were due to fly home.