Low-cost midlife crisis

In my interrail youth, I don’t remember ever getting a reservation for a train. You just showed up and got on. Travelling in the summer with half the other students in Europe meant that getting a seat was hit and miss, with the emphasis on miss. Night trains were the ne plus ultra of this kind of thing. I have memories (strong ones, but thankfully no longer terribly vivid) of trying to sleep in that bendy bit between carriages; of trying to sleep in the corridor; outside the toilet door; inside the toilet itself. I never tried it myself, but I saw people sleeping in luggage racks. But at the age of 20, you can kind of shrug off a night in which you got at most an hour of massively uncomfortable sleep.

The same was true of hotels. We never booked anything. We arrived somewhere and found a place to stay. There were people at popular stations meeting the night train offering rooms. And if, for whatever reason, you couldn’t find anywhere, you could get on another night train, or sleep at the station, or sleep on the beach or in a park. I once woke up in what I had thought was a park in Salamanca, which turned out to be the grounds of a hospital and it was littered with syringes. None of which, luckily, had perforated me.

Reading some corners of the Internet you would imagine that people my age think that (a) doing ludicrously stupid and dangerous things in your youth was a totally normal rite of passage; (b) kids these days are molly-coddled milksops who live a pathetic life of safety; and (c) this difference between the generations is the cause of all the world’s problems . Well I would like to counter this with the following: (a) doing dangerous and stupid things doesn’t get less stupid because you’re still alive; (b) kids these days are still perfectly capable of doing dumbass shit and demonstrably so (though I do feel like this generation are slightly less likely to be as fucking stupid as we were. But I see that as a plus in their column, not ours); and (c) we are the ones who have turned the world into the increasingly fascist nightmare on the verge of climate armageddon that it is now, not them.

The next time I see Bill D from Keighley saying “Remember when we used to play with unexploded WWII ordinance on the moors? Never did us any harm (well apart from Lenny, RIP). Kids today don’t know about those simple pleasures. That’s why everyone is so woke these days”, it’s just possible that I will commit a crime.

Anyway, to get to the point (eventually), our plan was to spend one night and a whole day in Berlin before taking the night train to Copenhagen via Hamburg. While the youngsters went off to their youth hostel, E and I went to the ticket office in the hauptbahnhof to see if it was possible to get sleeping places on that train. Turned out that not only were sleeping places out of the question but there weren’t even any seats left. In fact on none of the direct trains between Hamburg and Copenhagen were there any seats left. And these were trains that you are required to reserve seats on. Not on Friday, not on Saturday, not on Sunday. The very helpful DB woman made some suggestions and printed out some routes for us, but it didn’t look good.

We went off to our hotel and after an absolutely delicious Lebanese dinner, we sat down to try and come up with a plan. To exacerbate matters, accommodation was also very thin on the ground wherever we looked. Two of us spent two solid hours working the Internet. If I wanted to relive that I could tell you pretty much how many hotel rooms there were available on Friday in Berlin, Hamburg, Flensburg, Neumunster, and even Hannover (a long shot at one point). Or at least how many hotel rooms that didn’t need a mortgage to stay in.

One of the beauties of interrail is that you can just change your plans. The first time I went with friends, we arrived in Rimini to find it packed out and so instead went to Yugoslavia and stayed in a campsite owned by someone called Istarski Vodovod (unless Istarski Vodovod is Serbo-Croat for “the management”), and drank copious amounts of “mish-mash”, a kind of cheap Yugoslav sangria. So we looked into it. Perhaps see some more of Germany? Head over to Belgium? Go to Poland? (that last one was my suggestion because I was beginning to believe that we were better suited to staying behind the iron curtain.)

Eventually we gave up, with a resolution to “sleep on it” (ie postpone any form of decision).