That Summer: our series of escapes to long ago and far away

What we did on our holidays, and what our holidays did to us

Is there a summer that's stayed with you for the summers since? (Getty Images)

Joy and anger, triumph and disaster, passion and tears: a typical day on the travel desk of The Independent, perhaps, but also the range of emotions that travelling generates.

In the now-distant summer of 1994, the-then Weekend Editor, Stephen Wood, conceived a series called simply, That Summer. It became a collection of voyages of discovery for the soul.

Memories are distorted by time and distance, and prone to fading. But I bet you have taken at least one journey where your mental snapshots and soundbites remain strangely vivid even many summers later.

Each of us has experienced a holiday more intense, probably more daunting than all the others: when you first tasted freedom, when you discovered a passion for travel and quite possibly a fellow traveller, when the world changed your world for good.

“The past is a foreign country,” wrote LP Hartley in The Go-Between. “They do things differently there.”

At a time when travellers find themselves in the most reduced of circumstances, make your escape to long ago and far away.

Read the first pieces of the series here.

That Summer: Falling in love under the blue Madonna in Sicily in 1987

That Summer: Braving the borders of a new Siberia in 1995