Low-cost midlife crisis

Interrailing for oldies

Day 4: back on the rails

It was all very nice to have a break but a real interrailer can’t be hanging around in one place for ever. So we checked out and prepared to head on. But the departure was preceded by our first luggage locker experience of the trip.

Back in the day the luggage locker was an essential part of the interrail experience. You arrived in a city early in the morning off a night train, found the luggage lockers, dumped your bag, and then spent the day in the city. You returned to the station in the evening, picked up the bags and got another night train to another city. This way the interrail ticket not only provided your transportation, but your accommodation as well. The only place in the 80s that didn’t work was Spain where luggage lockers (and rubbish bins) were removed lest ETA put bombs in them. Since then fears of terrorism have become much more pan European, and in some places luggage storage now involves putting it through a metal detector before it being taken to a storage room by a human being. In Prague at least, however, there are lockers. Fancy ones at that, with complex computers that send you an SMS message with your code to get back in. We tried an extra large locker (in truth, the only options are large and extra large, like in chain coffee shops) to see how many rucksacks we could get in (yes! We are travelling with rucksacks for the authentic experience. No wheely suitcases for us). The sign suggested an extra large locker was big enough for a large and a small suitcase, but my older daughter, brought up on Tetris, managed to get 5 sizeable backpacks in. Result.

A couple more hours in Prague, after which we liberated our bags from their sardine-like existence (dead sardines, in cans. Not living ones. Being stuffed into a locker has very little similarity to swimming around enjoying the life of a sardine) and got back on a train. Only a 4.5 hour journey ahead, and we easily and quickly scored an entire compartment of 6.

Our train in Prague Station

The train journey from Prague to the German border near Dresden is bloody gorgeous. Follows the Elbe valley pretty much the whole way. This train didn’t have a bar (let me repeat that. It didn’t have a bar. On a train running between Czechia and Germany, two of the greatest beer nations on the planet. It’s nothing short of a disgrace). But the lack of a bar was compensated by a spectacular view. I recommend it.