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The Queen is the Queen of lots of places—Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Derby, the list
goes on.
What that means is that she has had to travel a lot in order to make sure that as many people
as possible in as many places as possible get waved at.
In fact, she is supposedly the most travelled head-of-state in history, probably at least
partially since she’s been Queen since the early jurassic period, almost.
While she’s cut back on the international travel in recent years, she still has, like,
a lot of houses that she needs to visit.
She typically starts the year at Sandringham House, stays there through early February,
then heads back to London to start her rotation of Buckingham Palace during the week, Windsor
castle during the weekends, which she maintains, except for a few longer stays at Windsor,
until the end of June.
It’s at that point that she heads up to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh,
for a week, before heading further up north in early-August to finish out the summer at
Balmoral Castle, and then heading back down to London where she stays until it’s time
to go to Sandringham House for the holidays.
That’s a lot of travel, especially for a 93 year old.
While of course a life traveling between palaces sounds nice, she has to do lots of waving
along the way which makes it a tiring lifestyle.
Now, starting with the closest, to get to Windsor, the Queen travels like a normal person
and uses a motorcade—good, done.
Going to Sandringham, though, she typically takes the train to the nearby King’s Lynn
station before driving the last bit.
Now, what makes this surprising is that she actually just takes the public, regularly-scheduled
train with normal, non-Royal, muggles on-board.
Of course, to keep up appearances, she does ride in first class.
For going to Scotland, to either Holyroodhouse or Balmoral, the Queen usually takes her private
train, known as the Royal Train.
This allows her to sleep along the way, and even to make trips from Edinburgh, where Holyroodhouse
is, to areas around Scotland as she fulfills her duties in relative comfort.
Of course, the unfortunate bit is that, despite having such a rail loving ruler, the best
compliment you can make about the UK’s rail system is that it’s better than the US’.
The Queen has, in her reign, of course had to travel outside the UK quite a bit considering
that she is the Queen in a number of other nations worldwide, and also the main figurehead
for the UK.
While she’s ramped down the quantity of this travel recently, she still has done some
in the past decade and this aspect of her travel is... complicated.
You see, by policy, the monarch herself does not travel on commercial fights.
While other members of the royal family do, with some even being spotted on Ryanair, it’s
considered far too complicated and risky for the Queen.
There are, in fact, a decent number of rules for royal flight including, for example, that
no two heirs to the throne are meant to fly on the same plane.
In practice, following this rule would be quite difficult since, for one, Prince Harry
and each of his three kids would have to each travel separately so the Queen has given permission
for this rule to be violated.
Now, even though the Queen is not meant to travel on commercial flights, she does not
have her own aircraft.
The British government does have a VIP configured version of an aerial tanker configured version
of an Airbus a330—yeah, I know it’s complicated—and it’s said that the Queen has first dibs
on this.
If the Queen’s not using it, then Prince Charles has second dibs, then the Prime Minister,
then British government ministers.
This hierarchy has led to some tricky situations—in 2017, the Prime Minister was forced to charter
a plane since Prince Charles was
using the government plane.
Ministers, at the bottom of the totem pole, rarely ever get to use the plane.
When he was foreign secretary, Boris Johnson complained to reporters about the bathroom
at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
He said, “I think it’s great, but it seems to be very difficult to get hold of.
It never seems to be available.
I don’t know who uses it, but it never seems to be available.”
Oh, actually, I’m told he was complaining about the plane but, really, applicable to
either.
Of course, the Queen herself has never used this plane since she hasn’t even left the
UK since its introduction in 2015.
When the Queen has travelled outside of Europe, though, the last time being 2011 with her
trip to Australia, she typically charters long-haul aircraft from British Airways.
The airline would reconfigure their aircraft with a sort-of bedroom suite for the Queen
and her husband and Heathrow airport, where they would normally leave from, even has a
private lounge specifically for the Queen and her family.
Chartering a huge aircraft like this does, of course, come at quite a cost for the royal
purse, but given the eerily similar appearance of the Queen of England and the Queen of Australia,
it’s always been considered a worthy expense, at least by those who get to decide, in order
to tie the Commonwealth together.
Now, I know a common problem people have is finding things to watch to fill up their time
when riding their private train to their castle in Scotland, but boy do I have the solution
for you.
Now hear me out here: what if we took Curiosity Stream—the streaming site with thousands
of documentaries and non-fiction titles—and bundled its subscription with that of Nebula—the
streaming site started by creators, including me, as a place to try new things on a platform
purpose-built for educational content.
That would be crazy, who would do that!
But wait, wait, wait, what if they did that bundle for the exact same price as the normal
CuriosityStream subscription.
What, they did?
That’s insane!
On the flip side, who would be insane enough to not take that deal, available at CuriosityStream.com/HAI.
That’s just $19.99, less than the cost of an iPhone 11, for a whole year of Curiosity
Stream and Nebula, and you know what’s the best part—you’ll be supporting myself
and plenty of other independent creators while you’re at it.