Low-cost midlife crisis

Once again the young uns went off to their youth hostel and we old folk went back to the station to check out reservations for our next leg. This felt even more important than previously.

The guy in Copenhagen station was, in common with every other railway employee we’ve encountered on this trip, helpful, friendly, informative and apologetic. When our number came up on the board we headed over to his window. He had that look on his face which said “I really want to help you but I have a nasty feeling you’re about to ask me something I can’t help with”. I started off “I’m hoping you can help us, we want to go to Stockholm…” his face fell. “I was really hoping you weren’t going to ask me that” he said, genuinely apologetic sounding, “This year getting a reservation to Stockholm is basically impossible, I already know that the direct trains are fully booked up until about February but I might have a plan B or a plan C. It’s just the 2 of you? Oh… 5? OK let’s see”

He engrossed himself in his computer, his increasingly forlorn expression telling the story. Eventually he emerged – “OK plan B and plan C are out, plan D fell through but I have come up with a plan E” he turned to retrieve a couple of printouts from the machine behind him, before launching into an explanation of a complex route, with 5 changes in places I’d never heard of, and involving a bus journey at some point along the way. A journey that would have taken all day. And of course we’d still need to get back. Possibly on another day and if it had just been the two of us, we might have considered it. But as it was we turned to each other and said almost as one “I think we need to skip Stockholm”

The plan after Stockholm (in those far off days, a week earlier, when I was perusing the app and imagining possibilities) was to take a long but apparently doable journey to Rotterdam. It would have been about 18 hours, but we would (in my mind) have a sleeping car on it, and get a good 6 or 7 hour sleep. Those days of innocence…

We used the opportunity to book seats from Copenhagen to Holland (which miraculously were available) for a few days hence, so at least we had that as a trophy from our otherwise thwarted expedition to the reservation office. Our new friend also said that he could still show us some possibilities to Gothenburg if we wanted “I’m afraid Swedish trains require a reservation, but you can get to Gothenburg without one, because you can do it on a Danish train”. We said we’d think about it.

Later on, from the woman we are staying with, we learned that this apparently ridiculous “February” comment, which I had taken to be a joke, was probably very accurate. A couple of weeks ago she had tried to book a train reservation in November or December to go up to Stockholm for the Christmas market. And there was nothing available.