My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

We don’t have a car and we haven’t  flown for 8 years (except when I went to Shetland for work in November, and again in May :)) We use trains a lot.  I mean a lot.  But I haven’t done a grand European train voy­age for years.

In the sum­mer of 1989, hav­ing spent a week on an IVS work­camp in a small vil­lage in the moun­tains of rur­al Turkey, I caught a train from Istanbul to Prague.  There were dif­fi­culties between Turkey and Bulgaria and this was the last train trav­el­ling west for the fore­see­able future.  It was crowded, full of Turks with bags of food for the days ahead. Of course, in the heat, the food did­n’t last, and 2 days later I was shar­ing all too small slices of stale bread with an eld­erly  Czech woman and a young couple in my car­riage,  the woman enthu­si­ast­ic­ally pro­claim­ing “din­ner is served” as we began our mea­gre feast! So it was memor­ies like these that came to mind as the idea  for this trip seeded.  The train was delayed by a lengthy bor­der cross­ing into Bulgaria where, at 3am, under the eye of fierce­some guards shout­ing instruc­tions I could­n’t under­stand we all had to get off the train and file into a ram­shackle bor­der hut.  I missed my con­nec­tion and spent a night sleep­ing amidst the rats at Belgrade station.

I could go on and on.  The memor­ies are so rich and so vivid, 20 years on.  The train car­riage camarader­ie, the creepy men (I was trav­el­ling alone), the smells, the exhaus­tion, the fathom­ing my way through new and tricky situ­ations, the absorp­tion of oth­er cul­tur­al norms and cus­toms, the food…

But that was all before train travel was really seen as a green option.  Green polit­ics was still some­thing the Germans did rather than us, and cli­mate change, even amongst my lefty act­iv­ist circles, was not men­tioned.  We did grand voy­ages across Europe by train because it was flex­ible, cheap and excit­ing.  Now we are doing it because it is flex­ible, excit­ing and green, but not cheap at all!  We really don’t earn a lot. We do work we enjoy, and have a delib­er­ately low mort­gage, but decid­ing to spend the money on train travel has really deepened my com­mit­ment to a low car­bon life­style.  And it feels good. Very, very good!

So what will it all be like as a fam­ily?  Will Callum get too tired? — he struggles to switch his mind off to sleep at home, so how on earth will he man­age with the excite­ment of 7 dif­fer­ent  coun­tries? Will I get too tired? I’m a ridicu­lously light sleep­er!  Armed with ear plugs I still rarely sleep well my first night in a new place.

But it’s not only expens­ive, it’s also really com­plic­ated.  Chris is geeky enough to *enjoy* the Thomas Cook timetable (we already have a winter and a sum­mer copy), and has the times of trains from Venice to Moscow off by heart.  We’re not going to Moscow.  He’s spent hours con­sult­ing the very nice and help­ful Man in Seat 61.  We’d got it all worked out, when, after book­ing a nice hostel in cent­ral Venice, we real­ised we had to leave the even­ing before if we were going to make our ren­dez-vous with Kerry and Athena in Athens, because the boats from Bari to Greece don’t run at that time on a Sunday…

These days an inter­rail tick­et isn’t enough for long dis­tance main line ser­vices in Europe.  You also need a reser­va­tion.  But Edinburgh sta­tion stopped book­ing European trains years ago, as did Birmingham New Street, and the web site we needed to access was down.…

But we are get­ting there, and are learn­ing so much as we go.  We’re now booked as far as Venice.