Low-cost midlife crisis

We did a day trip to Gouda and Delft today. As it was Thursday it was the weekly cheese market in Gouda. Anyone who knows me will be well aware of how much of a noble sacrifice it was for me to accompany my family to such a thing. (Though, to be honest, less of a sacrifice since I no longer have much of a sense of smell – a pre-covid condition)

Anyway I’m not here to do a travelogue I’m here to look at interrailing. We had more reservation challenges to deal with. Our next proposed trip after Rotterdam was to the UK. Theoretically the Eurostar train through the channel tunnel is covered by interrail, but obviously it’s one of those “reservation required” trains. It occurred to me that this might be a problem a few days ago and I tried to see whether we could get reservations – but the app said, in not so many words, “Reservations on the Eurostar? You’re having a laugh, intcha”. So we had to get ferry tickets – even ferry tickets for foot passengers are in short supply it seems, but I managed to get us some.

Rotterdam to London via the tunnel takes 3 hours. Rotterdam to London via the Calais to Dover ferry takes an unspecified amount of time largely dependent on what sound like chaotic passport lines. But at a bare minimum 9 hours. Which is a bit of a bummer. But part of the interrail experience. Plus, for reasons unknown, the timetable doesn’t really offer any way of getting to Calais from Rotterdam until mid afternoon, too late for our ferry bookings, so we have to leave here on Sunday in order to get to Calais on Monday lunchtime. And I’ll have to make reservations on those trains. Gah.

One other mild irritation – not exactly interrail connected but tangentially linked – public transport tickets in Rotterdam. There are cards you can buy (like oyster cards in London) and charge, which I assume is a reasonable way to do it. But if you’re only here for a couple of days, paying a deposit for a card and then trying to reclaim it afterwards seems like a lot of hassle. On our way back from Delft, I had the brilliant and cunning plan to get off at Blaak (a station in Rotterdam which also happened to be on the metro line we wanted). This cunning plan flopped because there were no effing metro ticket machines in Blaak that didn’t just top up cards. I quickly downloaded the app and tried to buy our tickets online – only to discover that you could only do that with a Dutch bank card. I don’t like to complain (much) but Rotterdam public transport people – get your shit together for fucks sake.

Anyway, we took the train back to Rotterdam Centraal, where we were able to buy actual tickets, get the metro two stops, change and half an hour later than the first time we were, as AC/DC had it, back in Blaak.

(my daughter was disgusted by that joke so I’m retelling it both to annoy her, but also in the hope of finding a more receptive audience.)