interrail

I noticed the Rail Delivery Group were about to withdraw from Interrail, but have now scrapped the idea.

I say keep it. I've travelled twice on youthful Interrail cards and can say that both trips are still packed with memories.

I started one of them in London, and the other in Germany (where I was living, at the time). And yes, I still have that small orange tent. The map shows approximately trip one. Entirely made up as we went along. The Alps and Greek Islands.

I know that people go on gap years now, to Australia, South America and India, but there's something densely packed about the experiences when one can simply write a new destination into a little book, hop a train, and go there.

Some examples, notwithstanding the changes in security, currency and correctness.

• sitting outside a smoky sunlit cafe in Brussels, with a copy of the Thomas Cook timetable, planning a route. The whole of Europe beckons.
• arriving in any European train station and looking for the lockers to stash backpacks.
• staying in German youth hostels and marvelling at their hotel-like quality.

• sleeping rough on park benches, under silver space blankets and with just enough local currency to buy a coffee and croissant in the morning.
• arriving in Venice on the day of the Historical Regatta.
• climbing the Acropolis in the midday sun.
• listening to other tourists marvelling as they do just one of our sightseeing trips
• Buying those little flat Greek leather sandals that I still wear.
• Being asked by the gun-toting Caribineri, to move from the steps of the train station in Rome
• Running, breathless, to catch the deck class ship from Patras to Brindisi
• Being offered packs of 200 cigarettes by 8-year-old boys in Naples
• Marvelling at how the train's formation would keep changing, and the coffee would reflect the local culture.
  

• Being offered a lift by Swiss baker to the local camp site.
• Seeing the frenzy of white goods like fridges being loaded onto the train in Serbia.

• Saying "See you in Rome," as our group divided, from the grassy slopes of Grindelwald.
• Planning a longer route in order to sleep overnight on the train.
• Triumphantly getting a couchette carriage.
• Pitching a tent on the beach in Greece.
• The cliche of meeting someone we knew, in the sea, on the shores of the Mediterranean

• Finding the Diana the Huntress Club in Athens, leaving all our bags and then getting stranded overnight on Aegina when we missed the last catamaran.
• Heading up the Jungfraujoch to the Ice Station and the Glacier, in the Swiss Alps, fresh from the sun of Greece.
• Eating beautiful red Rhone grapes as we flashed through the French countryside on a quiet express.
• Turning up at the Montreux jazz festival.
• Getting picked from the platform by a 'little old lady' to stay in her rental room in Salzburg.

• Stopping off in Belgrade because we'd been on the same train for 24 hours.
• Finding the Prater (Harry Lime) and the Blue Danube (not the big wide brown one) in Vienna.
• Walking through Pompeii

The list goes on. What about Cologne Cathedral? The Black Forest? The French Riviera, sitting eating a huge cool ice cream in Cannes? Monte Carlo?

I've been back to many of the places, on a combination of business and car-based road trips, but there's a certain magical thrill to arriving all low-carbon-footprint with one's belongings on one's back, in the main train station.

Hmmm. I'm still tempted...