Low-cost midlife crisis

The boat was on time. It left exactly on schedule (precisely 7 minutes after we got on) and arrived on time too at 6.30pm. There was a train to Lille at 7.30 and another (the last) at 8.30. It looked like we would get the earlier one which would have been nice. We joined the…

16.05 – that was the time of our ferry out of Dover. Obviously we’d rather have been on a train, but see threads passim. For a ferry, foot passengers have to check in 90 minutes in advance (it’s another of those anti-foot-passenger rules. The carbound only need to be there 60 minutes beforehand.) So our…

No trains today. It was a strike day on the trains in the UK. To some extent I follow the news from the UK so this wasn’t a surprise to me (and to some extent parts of our trip were planned with this in mind. I’m not sure how much this kind of thing would…

“I have no idea if the 17.57 train is going to be leaving from Cambridge today. I’ve tried calling the train company but they’re not picking up” – Station announcement We’ve travelled across half of Europe. According to the stats page of the app we’ve been in 11 countries so far and travelled about 4000…

Most of us didn’t do anything interraily today so I took the day off blogging. Instead here is a picture of a cricket match in the next village. I’ve never seen everything so parched and dry round here before. This is supposed to be the village green (and usually it is actually green)

The ferry finally docked about 40 minutes en retard and we waited to get off. Foot passengers, the forgotten children of the ferry, now have to wait until everybody else has gone, every car and lorry has driven off, before exiting. We got onto a bus, all 24 of us (by this time we all…

You would think that as they are probably the two most important cities in North East France, there would be regular train journeys between Lille and Calais. You would think wrong. I suspect the problem is the Eurostar, which has somehow taken control of this corridor rendering it virtually barren of regular and convenient SNCF…

All the trains from Rotterdam in the direction of Calais were fully booked up with no reservations to be had. One of the issues with the app is that it doesn’t really offer up alternatives when this happens so you have to try and come up with alternatives by chopping the journey into chunks, or,…

We didn’t take any trains today (well unless you count the metro, which doesn’t fall under interrail) One slightly related thing to note though – some  places in the Netherlands don’t take visa or mastercard (either as credit cards or debit cards). This is, as you might imagine, a fairly annoying hassle. I think it…

The first place we went the first time I went interrailing was Amsterdam. Obviously this was not a random choice. I have very good memories of that experience (and also some significant gaps in my memory. I have no idea why). Yesterday we went back to Amsterdam. First problem was that we discovered that to…