Low-cost midlife crisis

I feel like we are beginning to deal with real interrailing, warts and all. Saturday, I got more flashbacks.

As mentioned, we had been intending to go to Copenhagen, and the woman in Berlin Station had given us some routing options, which eventually we decided to follow. As the fast compulsory reservation trains were full, we had to do it bit by bit.

After checking out of the hostel, we got to the station and leaving everyone on the platform, I went to get us some breakfast. There was a long queue at the bakery place, but after an increasingly nervous last few minutes during which I considered giving up on at least 3 occasions, I managed to score some bready goodness (pretzels and croissants, since you ask, very Euro) and got back to my party just as our train was pulling in. It turned out this tense breakfast wait was much more important than I thought it would be.

Train 1 – Berlin to Hamburg. Nice train. Few minutes late. We all sat together. There was even a restaurant car where I got a coffee. B was with me and saw a kid getting an ice cream so asked me to get her one too. The woman behind the counter asked me “is it for you?” – “no, for my daughter” I gestured. She turned to B, smiled and asked “how old are you?” “22” “the thing is, that the ice creams are free for under 14s… But you were under 14 once…” and she handed her the ice cream. So, that was nice.

Train 2 – Hamburg to Flensburg. Much more of a regional train rather than an intercity. The first train being late, and Hamburg station being very large, meant that it was quite a rush. Not like I worried we’d miss it, more that there was no time to stop and think “I’m in Hamburg”. Busy train but again we all got seats, though not together. Not even in the same carriages. Some nice scenery, though a bit flat for my taste. It was a big train, double decker, and every seat was taken. I began to realise that probably at least 80% of the passengers were doing the trip we were doing. I sent word to my people that they should be close to the doors, bags ready, when we arrived in Flensburg.

While we were trying to work out whether we had options a couple of days earlier, I looked at pictures of Flensburg. It seems like a really pretty town (with very high priced hotels) at the tip of a fjord. We saw none of that. Just one platform of frenzied chaos as hundreds of travellers dashed from one train across to the waiting other, to Aarhus (in the middle of Aarstreet)

Train 3 – Flensburg to Fredericia. Packed. People, luggage, bicycles. I think most, if not all, the seats were reserved, but I’m not sure how you’d get to your seat if you had one. After a couple of stops one became free near where I was standing so I sat down, assuming it would only be for a few minutes before it was claimed by its rightful owner. As an aside seats on Danish trains are huge, like thrones. Big and comfortable and occupying lots of space.

All through the day the various train staff had been great – cheerful, helpful, informative and good humoured. It can’t be easy dealing with these numbers of potentially fractious people, tired, probably hungry and thirsty. Even the Danish passport control bloke who came on and squeezed his way through the throng to check everyone, was friendly enough.

I’d like to be able to report on the scenery of southern Jutland but I didn’t really see any of it. We pulled into places with extremely Danish sounding names like Rødekro and Lunderskov, but I don’t really have any memories – even though I’m writing this less than 24 hours later.

I think in the end I held onto the seat I had found for about half of the 90 minute journey. But that was luckier than most. And then of course – we did the same thing all over again at Fredericia. Like one of those videos of the Tokyo subway at rush hour. Only with backpacks.

Train 4 – Fredericia to Kobenhavn. Of course packed. An announcement came over the address system from the guard in another carriage “I’m standing in carriage 18 near the back of the train and there’s quite a lot of standing room” she said, “so those of you in the really packed ones like 71 and 72 might want to come here.” I was in 61 and I couldn’t really imagine what a “really packed” one would look like. Nor how in hell one would set out on such an expedition through the train. I was about 5m from the toilet and even that looked like a journey fraught with difficulties. The good news was that this train only stopped once between where we got on and Copenhagen, so the reshuffling and complexity of people getting on and off was not going to be endlessly repeated. Also, after that stop in Odense, I realised I could sit on the steps to the door, knowing that I wasn’t going to be in anybody’s way.

Still, we made it. We got to Copenhagen at just after 4pm. It was around this time that I realised that we’d not eaten after the Franco-German baked products about 7 hours earlier and we were all probably a bit hungry. I checked and it turned out that I was right. So we went off for lunch? Tea? Dunch? Whatever.

Oh and then of course it was back to the station for some more reservation/planning action, of which more later…

As it turned out, we spent the whole day in Berlin and spent a second night – in a youth hostel. Even in my own head I’m not actually a youth (I think I’m about 35 in my head, rather than the 56 that the rest of the world sees, and which is born out by the evidence of the actual number of years I’ve been alive). Well youth hostels have changed…

Firstly, they are just hostels now. They cater mostly to youths, but they are not age restricted. Though, as a fogey, one does feel a little out of place.

Secondly, and most obviously, they have sprouted like mushrooms. There used to be one or perhaps two in a city, and were usually affiliated to the IHYA. They tended (at least in my experience) to be fairly basic places, run on a shoestring and sort of a service. They may even have been run as charities or NGOs (I presume the YMCA in the US kind of fit this model). Now they are big business, with bars and cafes, where large numbers of people can stay and meet up and get wasted. And, they are not exactly cheap either. A dorm bed is about €40 in most places. Some even run the kind of scam that low cost airlines run, drawing you in with a low price offer and then whacking charges on top. “Want to breathe air, while on board? That’ll be extra”. One of the hostels we located promised a bed for €27, but then added “you are not permitted to use a sleeping bag in our hostel, and you must rent sheets for €7”. So, that would be €34 then.

Anyway, the plan had been that in most places the members of our party who actually were young, would stay in hostels and the old folk among us would stay somewhere else. Our first night in Berlin, that’s exactly what we did. The unanticipated second night we all ended up in one. We managed to get one room for 4 to ourselves, while B, my older daughter, volunteered for a bed in a bigger dorm with strangers.

After we put our bags down we went out to be tourists and when we came back her stuff had been put on the floor and clearly more people had checked into that dorm than there were beds. This kind of confirmed my suspicions/prejudices about the level of organisation at hostels. But they did manage to locate her another (unoccupied) bed. The bar didn’t seem like my kind of place. Or rather if I had sat in it I’d have been assumed to be a narc, or simply a dodgy old bloke leching after people young enough to be my grandchildren. There was a big sign down in the bar reading “Please respect our neighbours, be quiet after 10pm”. I have to say that the neighbours didn’t get much respect. It did get a fair bit quieter after midnight though and it was Friday so perhaps the neighbours are a bit more tolerant then.

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).

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.

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.

We arrived in Berlin around 5pm after a very enjoyable journey. And that’s when things started to get complicated…

We didn’t take any trains on day 3 and I don’t really want to bore you with “what we did in Prague” content, so instead I’ll fill in a bit of the back story.

Rather than some kind of midlife crisis* this trip really came about because a few months ago I learned that to celebrate the 50th anniversary of interrail, there was a week long offer when interrail tickets were half price. You had to buy them in that window, but you could start using them any time in the next year. For an adult (in this case over 27s) this amounted to a ticket price of just over €300. I think under 27s were around €225. I discussed this with my other half, and our two daughters, and my younger daughter’s friend was quickly added to the discussion, and unusually (but necessarily) quickly we made the decision to buy them.

Obviously in the times of Covid, this may have turned out to be a bit of a risk (and it may still be one, with numbers again on the rise), but it was after we went for this option that I became aware of the chaos in Europe’s airports this summer, so it seems like we chose well.

*I presume most midlife crises are unconscious and people don’t actually say to themselves “hmm, I think it’s time for my midlife crisis. Guess I’ll buy a Porsche” so obviously it may still be one, as much as I tell myself it was a rational decision.