in-between: eurail anecdotes

Currently sitting in one of those in-between spots right now—the airport—and I’ve been thinking about some stories from Europe that weren’t exactly in one place or the other.

One of the aspects of my Europe trip that I was most looking forward to was using my Eurail pass to take trains all over the continent. I took a ton. The complete set of journeys is mapped below by the Eurail app.

One of our first mishaps was on the train from Vienna to Innsbruck. Getting on the train mere minutes before it departed, we were relieved to find enough seats. Really nice seats, actually. And the Wi-Fi, which typically sucks on trains if it’s even available, was surprisingly fast. Things started making sense when the ticket checker came around, scanned our passes, and informed us that we were sitting in first-class seats and would have to head towards the second-class cars immediately.

Embarrassed, we lugged our backpacks down several cars to find the second-class cars completely full, with people standing in the aisles. We thought it was about to be a very long 3-hour journey. Thankfully, passengers started filing out as we made more stops and we were able to secure seats.

On our route from Innsbruck to Florence, we had to buy seat reservations that placed me across from a very striking girl with dark, short-cropped hair and lots of piercings. She also had a big backpack, so I introduced myself and asked where she was headed.

Livia was from Switzerland, reaching her one-month mark of solo inter-railing with some great stories to tell. I was on week two. But we were both headed to Genova and upon further conversation, found that we were staying at the same hostel as well.

The ticket checker came around and I showed him my seat reservation while I pulled up my train ticket. I forgot to validate it, and was just about to when he stopped me in a very disapproving tone. I’d validated tickets while on the train before, so didn’t realize the issue, but he dismissed this with the notion of, “I’m just doing my job.” Suddenly, there was a 70 euro charge in front of me, the cost of the ticket, and a “Cash or card?”

A few minutes after he left, I felt the tears coming. I knew it wasn’t a super big deal, but when you’re backpacking losing 70 euros is like squandering 3 nights’ worth of stay. Livia saw the red in my eyes and switched to sit right next to me. And there I was, being hugged and consoled by someone I’d met only minutes ago but understood my situation better than anyone else.

Another slight mishap was on our way to Paris, when we had to catch a connection in Nîmes. Except instead of getting off at the station named Nîmes, we got off one stop earlier at Nîmes Pont-du-Gard. Totally missing our train to Paris, which always needs an advance reservation, we rushed to the ticket office in panic. We ended up being able to get seats for a train just about 2 hours later, which in the grand scheme of things was not a big deal.

Most of our train problems, however, would present themselves in the UK. But I’ll get into those another time.

where next??

Tomorrow I embark on probably the greatest feat of my gap year: summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m meeting up with eight other Morehead-Cains (and Katarina and Philip) in Arusha, Tanzania to continue an unofficial Morehead-gap year tradition! The hike is seven days and six nights, using the Machame Route. Wish me luck!

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