“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” (Mark Twain – Innocents Abroad)
This is the first post in what I hope to be a weekly series which will appear at 08:00 (UK time) every Friday morning. It is no coincidence that this is being launched on the same day that the United Kingdom is due to leave the European Union, an act of gross national folly, which in a few years time historians will be analysing to see how a once sensible nation took leave of its senses. This is my own small way of celebrating the rich diversity of Europe.
I’ll provide updates about my travels and recollections of previous journeys. I hope you will enjoy the ride.
As my first trip in 2020 is not for a couple of months, over the next few weeks I will post reminiscences and other general musings about travel in Europe. If I’m away, the site updates will be scheduled in advance to maintain the weekly posting frequency, with detailed reports of current trips upon my return. The best way to follow my travels in real-time will be on Twitter @EuropeExplored – there’s a copy of the Twitter feed on the front page of this site. I will also try to keep updated the map showing all the towns and cities I’ve visited.
Planning
For some, planning can be a chore, but for me it is part of the pleasure of travelling. Gone are the spontaneous pre-Internet days of just getting an Interrail pass and seeing where it will take you. While Interrail may still provide good value, generally I’ve found that it is significantly cheaper to buy advance tickets that commit you to a specific train. Booking windows vary enormously – ranging from six months in advance on many German and Austrian services, to the other extreme of it being impossible to make an advance booking (except in person) on Slovenian railways. So I’ve got used to diarising when the bookings will open for each leg of my forthcoming trips and trying to buy when the cheapest tickets are available – some real bargains can be found. I’ve concluded that railway pricing is weird – I may return to the subject in a future post.
Of course, the downside of purchasing advance tickets is that it leaves less flexibility should things go wrong. But things don’t go wrong, do they? That is apart from the odd French transport strike, a line being blocked for weeks by a derailed train, Europe put into quarantine over coronavirus, …
Europe Explored 