New Year’s resolution

I need to blog more. This year I’ve been to:

1. Paris (🇫🇷) for New Year’s celebrations, followed by a trip to Italy to see Milan (🇮🇹), Bologne (🇮🇹), and Venice (🇮🇹) before returning to Paris and from there to home
2. Zürich (🇨🇭)
3. Several towns and cities in the Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions of France, including Nantes (🇫🇷) and Angers (🇫🇷), as the main caregiver for my mother who was also on that trip
4. Confuzzled, Birmingham (🇬🇧)
5. A 1080 km cycle along the Rhine, taking me through (amongst other places) Hoek van Holland (🇳🇱), Rotterdam (🇳🇱), Randwijk (🇳🇱), Duisburg (🇩🇪), Köln (🇩🇪), Kestert (🇩🇪), Worms (🇩🇪), Hochstadt (🇩🇪), Lichtenau (🇩🇪), Village-Neuf (🇫🇷), and Basel (🇨🇭), before making a rapid series of Rhine crossings both ways, taking a few wrong turns, going up the worst possible not-a-mountain Swiss hill I could’ve chosen and being picked up by my friend from Zürich to hang out at his place and take a day trip to try (and fail) to reach the source of the Rhine near Andermatt (🇨🇭)
6. California (🇺🇸), based mainly in Davis, including a multi-day road trip along the I-80 to Salt Lake City (Utah), returning via Reno (Nevada), camping one night more than expected in an unincorporated village near Redding whose name I can’t remember because the Carr Fire had literally begun a few hours before it diverted us to a much longer route to the next stop — McKinleyville — and a few days after that visiting Eureka as we returned to Davis, having a few day trips to Sacramento, and then seeing the Pacific coast of San Francisco
7. Berlin (🇩🇪), because I’ve moved here to escape from the UK
8. Cambridge (🇬🇧) (where I used to live) and Portchester (🇬🇧) (near family and old friends, and it has a castle)
9. The Mediterranean coast of Spain, in particular the Orihuela Costa (🇪🇸), Cartagena (🇪🇸), and El Castell de Guadalest (🇪🇸)
10. Helsinki (🇫🇮), where I was for New Year’s, but I didn’t have anyone around for the celebrations this time, and my flight home the next day was too early in the morning to be worth going out alone.

I need to finish off my original series of blog posts on the topic of travelling around Europe for a month on an Interrail pass just before the Brexit referendum vote before I do these in any detail.

 

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Europe by rail, part 1 of 11: The British Isles

A trip around Europe with no plan beyond a backpack full of clothes and an Interrail pass. This is something quite out of character for me, but if I’d planned everything in any detail I would likely never have gotten started, and time was against me — even rushing it like this was putting me in danger of not being back soon enough to vote in the EU referendum.

The drama started while I was packing, as I suddenly noticed the absence of my credit card. There was still no sign of it in the morning, so I cancelled it online with no chance of getting a new one in time. I never did find it, even when I got back.

Early morning rush to catch the bus to the train station! Except the bus doesn’t go as far as the train station any more. So to the city centre instead and hope I wouldn’t miss my connection! But it was OK, because en route I realised that the ferry I’d expected to catch was going in the wrong direction, and the one I really wanted was departing nine hours later. Well, that saved me the worry of catching the next bus, which was extremely fortunate because that bus never came. I double checked the credit card situation with the bank while I was in town, and it looks lost rather than stolen, so that’s good. Still no bus (a common problem with British public transport), so I walked the rest of the way to the train station.

It was a fairly long train journey by my usual standards, and I found that I had forgotten how to open slam-door trains in the decade or two since they disappeared from the line of my childhood home town. I almost missed my second stop until I realised that the window could be pushed down and I could use the handle on the outside of the door.

England is a mixture of outstanding beauty and litter strewn dumps, and I saw both on the trip to the ferry port. The dumps I saw were in the run-down brownfield sites (next to the train line, obviously) within towns and cities. Urban wasteland.

The trip took me through the villages of Mistley (population 2,685) and Wrabness (population 400), both of which had their own stations despite their small size. I feel like some of our place names are jokes I don’t understand.

The residents of the streets near Harwich International don’t like the EU. I saw many signs saying “vote leave” and not a single “remain”. You might think a town next to a major shipping port might like the outside world, but it seems not. The signs had all gone by the time I’d returned, presumably out of respect for Jo Cox who had died the day before. The place is run-down and tired, with streams used as litter dumps and an abandoned house whose windows had been bricked up long enough ago that even those bricks had started to crumble and fall away.

Getting on the cruise ship itself was the first time I really felt like I was in an enormous vehicle. Jumbo jets, even 747s, are so narrow they just don’t have that effect. Everything was priced as you might expect for a captive audience, of course. The sailing was smooth, assuming it’s still called “sailing” now that sails are archaically obsolete.