I’m with you, Kurt. As someone whose travel mantra has always been “are we there yet”, I admit to being a dedicated and unabashed armchair traveller.

It’s not only cheap, but you don’t need visas, and you can go wherever your imagination is willing to take you.   

All the better if you have a comfy chair and a pot of tea – my idea of first class travel.

There are so many ways to travel “virtually” these days, beyond poring over maps and magazines.  

My first experiences of armchair travel occurred in the dentist’s waiting room as a terrified six-year-old. Forty-five years on, I still choose National Geographic over Little Golden Books to take my mind off the ominous zinging of the drill.

Back then it was vivid images of mudmen from Papua New Guinea, Kalahari bushmen perched one-legged in the desert, or a moose crossing a frozen Alaskan highway; transported from the northern suburbs to the northern hemisphere with the flick of a page.

We grew up with armchair travel as a staple. In the 70s it was classics like the Leyland Brothers and Bill Peach’s Australia. In the 80s, Michael Palin took us around the world in 80 days – in the 90s Lonely Planet invited us along the road less travelled – while in the noughties we rode pillion with Ewan McGregor as he motorcycled from the top of Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa.

Vicarious travel. I love it all.

Now that the NBN has finally made it possible to stream vision to the wilds of Strathfieldsaye, my armchair can take flight on a whim.

Last week I journeyed with Samuel Johnson in search of hipsters – excellent company he was, too. We went from Sydney to London to New York and back again, and I was still in bed before midnight.

GeoGuessr.com drops you in a random street anywhere in the world and challenges you to guess where you are. It’s every armchair traveller’s dream.

We played for hours the other night. Touched down in Lisbon, Lebanon, Latvia… and Logan – the VS Holden parked on the nature strip was a dead giveaway.

On Sunday afternoon my armchair-travelling son and I dropped in on the Coachella Music Festival in California.

It was approaching midnight at the foot of the Santa Rosa mountains when Jack White and his band took to the stage. And while the mosh pit was 8000 miles away, there were goosebumps in Strathfieldsaye when the crowd demanded an encore by spontaneously singing the guitar riff from Seven Nation Army.

“Music is sacred,” Jack declared to the heavens – and my armchair soared.