I first set up this blog nearly ten years ago! I was about to turn 60, and for my birthday we planned an Inter-Rail trip. And now I am going to be 70, and the Swan Whisperer wasn't really able to celebrate his 70th birthday, just over two years ago, because we were in lockdown - although, to be fair, we had two wonderful Zoom parties when we spoke to people we would not otherwise have seen from Australia and Japan and all over! So we have decided to go Inter-Railing again this June, to celebrate our three score years and ten! Or twelve, as appropriate!
Inter-Rail is a very different animal now than it was ten years ago. It's all paperless - you buy your passes (I've already done that) and then store them in an app on your phone, and you can do all your planning and timetabling, etc, within the app, or using their website. And Eurostar is, not exactly included, but a special fare so massively cheaper than the normal fare to Brussels. We're going first class - well, why not? Much more comfortable than standard, and you often get a free cup of tea or similar perks.
Because we travel so much anyway, we want to go to places where we wouldn't really go in the motor home, so we are starting off going to Scandinavia - Oslo, Bergen (perhaps), Stockholm, Kiruna - and then from Stockholm we'll get the sleeper to Hamburg, and then the direct train - maybe a sleeper, we'll see - to Vienna, and then on to Budapest, Bucharest and possibly Sofia before heading home. It will take some working out, and we will spend at least one day, perhaps two, in each city. I don't know yet how long we'll be travelling for - we have two months in which to use our 15 travel days, and I'm not quite sure whether the out-and-home days count or not. I doubt we'll be away two months, though, although it might be over 3 weeks!
This is all going to be in addition to, not instead of, our normal trips to France and Germany in the motor home! We will cut our Oberstdorf trip short, though, and go more-or-less straight there and back, giving us plenty of time to get organised for this trip. I expect we'll still go to France at the end of February/beginning of March, and then we'll see about trips in the autumn. But I am looking forward to the Inter-Rail trip, especially as we now know roughly where we are going!