Back in the summer, when I bought this sale-price pass, I wasn’t really sure what I’d do with it or when I’d get round to using it.
My first idea was to have a sparkly-tat tour on my way back to the UK for Christmas, but it never really occurred to that me such a trip would ever come to fruition as there have been many ideas and many tedious spreadsheets since. I planned bits of it anyway, because why wouldn’t I, then put it to sleep for a while while getting distracted by other things.
Then in October, or thereabouts, it came to pass that I decided I would buy a Eurostar ticket from Brussels to London for a Sunday in December — just in case — so that whatever happened all I had to do was get to Brussels from one side and then to Hereford on the other. This was simple and I thought nothing more of it until I was casually playing around with the seat reservation tool on the GWR web site whereupon I accidentally made a seat reservation for the 15:02 Avanti West Coast service from Euston to Crewe on the 10th December. It hadn’t been my intention to actually make a reservation because I only wanted to see if I could choose my seat (computer says “no”) but there we are.
My fate was then sealed, in a way, as the reservation can’t be cancelled and I felt I might sound a bit stupid trying to explain to someone on the phone that I’m an idiot. Descending into the rabbit-hole of madness a little further I then decided to make a pass reservation for the Eurostar that will get me to London in time to to get the Crewe train, made the TGV reservation to get me to Strasbourg, and hurriedly invested in a pair of active child-cancelling earbuds which were half-price on Amazon because the box was apparently damaged.
A start point and an end point is sufficient planning for a rail trip, and I had no time to faff about with trifling details such as where I would go in-between (to use all seven days of travel sensibly) or where to stay and how to work. At the point where dates were approaching and I looked at the festive trip again, it seemed that using up an already paid-for Interrail pass for a magical mystery tour was looking a better deal than buying point-to-point tickets to the UK. All this is how, in a roundabout way, on a sunny Wednesday morning at the end of November and after a coffee and a chocolatine at the station in Angoulême, I was sitting on the 9h35 TGV 5440 to Strasbourg, excitedly clutching a picnic and manhandling a finger puppet.
There was not much to do for four hours and fifty-four minutes. The man sitting next to me had a laptop which he’d clearly spent a lot of money on, apparently leaving himself able only to afford a mouse that was equipped with a left-click that could demolish houses.
In Marne la Vallée I started on the lunch I had prepared, really an excuse to start on the wine, which consisted of potato and other salads I’d cobbled together in a “use up the kitchen” experience last night to accompany my quiche provençale which I’d bought in the shop. There were also two hard-boiled eggs, some madeleines, a Snickers, some nutty-honey energy bar and some afterthought fruit. It was quite the feast. Meanwhile, the man next to me took a break from violently smushing his mouse to click through pictures of golfing paraphernalia to eat a sandwich which looked functional, if not significantly inferior to what I was having. I sipped my wine, quietly unvanquished.
In Strasbourg, I didn’t feel the need to hang around as I have already had a Christmasy experience in Strasbourg before so I just took the time to have a look the station and find the next train to Basel which was a rather lovely old Corail train disguised as a TER. It had big lovely seats in first class, from which the guard was ruthless in ejecting incorrectly-ticketed ruffians. The experience of the train, not the ruffians, was marred only by the slightly grimy windows, but there was still plenty of pretty to gawp at. Everyone else got off in Colmar, perhaps knowing something I didn’t.
Basel did not impress last time I was there, but this time I had time to wander round a little more and discovered that it’s actually quite a nice station. The bit out the front where we waited in 2019 was still populated by shouty drunks but this time everything was redeemed by a woman on the concourse handing out free Appenzellerin cheese samples who failed to notice I’d wandered in and out of a few exits a few times and she’d given me quite a lot of free cheese.
I enjoyed some of this on the journey to Zurich on a very nice train with a proper quiet zone where I worried my cheese-eating was probably a little bit loud and that the Schweizer Käsepolizei might have to intervene; I did the Appenzellerin test as with as little rustling as possible.
I later spoke enthustiastically (but not too loudly) about the cheese with the guard in the dining car (busy, not many people actually dining, lots of clicking of mouses), who was very diplomatic about French cheese until he learned I wasn’t French and therefore not agin any suggestion that Swiss cheese was also good. I smiled back, diplomatically, as I washed down/away the taste with a coffee, the price of which had me thinking I’d have done better financially to not accept free stuff, to stay put in the quiet compartment, and to suck on a Fisherman’s friend discreetly enough so as not to arouse the suspicion of the Bonbonpolizei.
In the evening I learned from Hostess that apart from Man Cheese and (Brand New) Lady Cheese, Appenzell is also famous for its beer, and being the last place in Switzerland to introduce universal suffrage in 1990 after having it forced upon them at the federal level.
Zürich Hauptbahnhof has a Christmas market which is one of Europe’s largest indoor Christmas markets, apparently. I knew this when “planning”, of course, and had scheduled an hour between trains for a walk around looking at over-priced sparkly-tat and sampling the traditional beverages of the season. I’d been looking forward to my Glühwein all the way from Angoulême but on arrival discovered that there is such as thing as Glühgin, which I think may now be my new favourite thing.
I sampled that for the hour and it was very nice.
Under the massive Christmas tree and unable to tell apart the hundreds of people streaming past them, the girls handing out Lindt chocolate bears — that well-known icon of Christmas — were thrusting chocolatey goodness upon anyone who stretched out a hand or showed interest in chocolate. I walked past them a few times before the final train of the day, a quiet and comfy SBB Intercity service to Zug which was clean, smooth, and terrifyingly punctual. It was dark by this point so there was little to see.
Hostess collected me at the station in Zug, and was delighted with her exquisite gifts of cheese samples and chocolate bears.
