I think this is officially day one of the Interrail extravaganza.
I am a late-comer to the Interrail experience. For years, I’ve checked into the web site and thought “ooh”, but have never got round to doing it. But then, at the beginning of the year, I decided that I needed to do something interesting and cheap with my six-week holiday, so I press-ganged a friend, bought a book and started planning. I’ve been planning for a while; I bought the tickets back at the beginning of the year when the Interrail site had a sale on, and have been really looking forward to it since.
I’ve not done this before, so my excitement may be irritating. Please bear with me.
A friend drove us to Angoulême in the morning — I made sure we left plenty of time because there was no way I was getting this wrong — where we caught the 9:46 TGV 5440 to Strasbourg. The TGV is lovely, as ever, and as I’d been careful to book window seats for the whole thing, so we got a lovely view of bits of France as we trundled north.
French rail journeys are usually uneventful; the TGV is rapid and efficient, and nearly always gets you from where you were to where you wanted to be with minimum fuss. Nothing exciting happens.
I’ve been up and down this line many times, so there was nothing new about it, but the prospect of using the train for pleasure rather than work gave the view more appeal and it didn’t take long to settle down into some window-licking as the world sped by.
And then we arrived in Strasbourg.
The station in Strasbourg is quite interesting, as far as stations can be. The façade of the station was encased in glass as part of the work to increase capacity of the station for the TGV Est in 2007, which is novel. It’s quite pretty, but we didn’t spend much time admiring it as we’d made the decision to press on as Strasbourg can be visited at any time.
After an hour or so pootling through the countryside on a TER, we arrived in Basel. We didn’t stay long. Admittedly, it’s unfair to go on first impressions, but we both very quickly declared Basel to be a bit of a shithole, and not an enjoyable place to wait for a train; the front of the station ws mostly populated by loud, drunk people, who were loud and drunk. It wasn’t an enjoyable wait, so it was quickly decided we’d get on the next train out of there — an ICE — and instead chill in Zürich, which is much cleaner and generally a much nicer place to be killing time with a conspicuous pile of bags.
Our final train of the day was the 20:40 Euronight to Zagreb. As this is a bit of a birthday treat — and the person I’m travelling with is old — we’d booked a two-berth sleeper compartment. Night trains are something of a novelty, as France has all but cancelled its night trains in favour of the TGV, and so my last experience of an Intercités de Nuit was a sweaty six-berth couchette compartment to Nice from Bordeaux. Not as nice as it sounds.
When I was commuting regularly to and from Paris, I used to longingly gaze into the RENFE Trenhotel whenever I saw it and think it would be a fabulous adventure to travel between Paris and Madrid or Barcelona overnight. I was always fascinated by the fact that travellers (guests?) can dine at a table — rather than stand in a “bar” trying desperately to conjur some element of romance whilst clinging onto a table for dear life and feeling slightly short-changed by a microwaved croque monsieur in a soggy cardboard box.
“Lock the door,” was the last thing the guard suggested as he smiled and took our tickets. So we did. We stayed up until the light went, then let a succession of locomotives whisk us through the night.
