That's very true and unless Dr Who is your next door neighbour, now is all any of us have. I did what I did in the 60's / 70's etc because that was now then. I certainly didn't see it as a golden age, it was just today. It had it's good points - not too many people were shooting at each other (in Europe anyway - Vietnam was off my list at the time), (some) borders were more open than they had previously been (no iron curtained eastern Europe but the hippie trail to India was in full swing) and cheap(er) jet travel through package holidays meant that the idea of visiting foreign lands was percolating though society.

There were bad bits as well - who remembers that there was a cholera outbreak in Italy in 73 or that there was a strict £50 limit on taking spending cash out of the country (About £5-600 now - see how far that gets you without plastic). Our route took us right through the middle of the cholera zone (cue family rows about irresponsibility) and we had to smuggle extra cash out. All the sort of usual rule bending and "wing and a prayer" planning that's still needed now if anything's going to actually happen.

There is a nostalgia for some sort of golden age of travel where the problems that beset or detract from traveling now didn't exist. The Orient Express with Michelin Star level dining rather than a Big Mac, a flying boat to Cairo where you're on first name terms with the pilot rather than packed like sardines into a Ryan Air flight etc. It must have been better, or at least more romantic. I suspect the Big Mac and Ryan Air options are going to look pretty romantic to people in 50 yrs time. My 60's and 70's trips were just the way things were done at the time and I never for a second thought I'd be having this sort of "conversation" all this time later.

In reality nothing much has changed - you can communicate a bit easier but the postcards I sent were themselves an advance over what was available in the 30's. Bikes are not really that much better - they're a bit more refined but how reliable does something have to be before it's not an issue and countries / borders come and go - easy access to the Maghreb countries then but no eastern bloc and the other way round now. I'm planning more trips and I certainly don't think it's been downhill since the 70's. One of the trips then may have been a turning point for me personally but that's another issue.