Debí Tirar Más Fotos

The last time I used a Eurail pass I was twenty-two and still in college. My friends and I hopped on and off trains and ferries from London to Corfu over a couple of months before reporting to Lancashire, England for our student teaching assignments. It was my first backpacking trip, first time on a plane, and first time using my brand new Kodak VR35 camera with its cool automatic pop-up flash.

I have many feelings of nostalgia about those train rides, admittedly through a thirty-nine year filter. Though I took plenty of photos, I really should have taken more, and it didn’t help that several undeveloped rolls were lost along the way.

I do recall many overnight journeys crammed into compartments with strangers from across Europe, a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine as sustenance, seats that unfolded to make one huge “bed” of the cabin, bodies pressed up against each other. Some nights I snuck into an empty first class cabin and enjoyed a sound but unadventurous sleep.

When we weren’t sleeping on trains, we stayed at youth hostels. I remember being upset if a bed cost more than $10 a night.

Miss the ferry to Dublin? No problem, the next one was to Belfast so off I went.

One night after chatting with travelers over several beers (it helped me sleep better in the hostel dorms) in a country I don’t even remember, my friend and I made last-minute decision to go to Greece. After checking the handy Eurail timetable with its microscopic print, we determined if we left in the morning, we could travel to the tip of Italy the next day and catch a night ferry over to Corfu, a Greek island I had never heard of before that night. The next day we followed our new “plan” and headed to Greece for an adventure. It did not disappoint.

These free-spirit, spur-of-the-moment decisions were what I was thinking of when I impulsively bought my second Eurail Pass last fall. This time it came with a senior discount, which should have been my first clue that a lot has changed in the decades since my first rail adventure.

A few more things have changed in the years since my last Eurail trip. The pass is now an app and has been excruciatingly frustrating to navigate, reservations are needed on many trips (for an extra fee), a real bed on an overnight train has another cost that is often greater than if I booked a hotel for the night, and I’m not twenty-two years old anymore!

It’s also true that beer will no longer help me sleep through an overnight train journey or a snoring-filled hostel dorm. In fact, it has the opposite effect.

Despite longing for spontaneity, I’ve spent a lot of time planning which it turns out I really enjoy. So far I have booked six Home Exchanges in five countries with more to come. A few AirBnBs, some hotels, and one or two hostels for old times’ sake are filling in the gaps.

My sister and brother-in-law will meet me on the “middle finger” of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, I’ll hike through the Hidden Valley for a week in Albania, spend six days in a campervan in Austria, my son may or not make an appearance at some random moment, and I even have a ticket to the opera in Budapest.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll also see “fairy chimneys” in Turkey, cliff-top monasteries in Greece, and wander around Transylvania. All of this and more in seventy days. (I’m determined to get the best bang for my buck with my Eurail pass!)

There’s still some flexibility in my plans, some unknown destinations, some room for spontaneity. But the planning has gotten me through this long and snowy winter, and it allows me to discover more. And this time I will be sure to take more photos (and don’t have to worry about losing the film).

More to come soon!