This video was made possible by Curiosity
Stream. When you sign up at the link in the description
you’ll also get access to Nebula—the streaming video platform that HAI is a part of. 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.
