Interrail Adventure Part 1: Planning

I can't believe it's been nearly 2 years since I went abroad! While I'm still confined to dreaming about foreign holidays from the UK this year, I thought I'd look back at my solo Interrail trip in August 2019. The whole journey ended up being far too long for one blog post so I have split it up into parts. In this first part we explore how this trip came about, planning the trip and some little sneak previews of what's to come.

It all started when I heard about DiscoverEU - a scheme which started in 2018 providing a chance for 18 year old's across Europe to win free Interrail passes. I'm pretty sure I first heard about it from UnJaded Jade's YouTube videos of her own Interrail trip in 2018, although I think my Grandpa also told me about it after reading about the previous year's initiative in the newspaper. I made a mental note to check back on the website when the next round of applications opened.

In early 2019, after my first semester at university, I started considering what I would be doing that summer. There was my choir's trip to Belgium in June and my cousin's wedding in France in early July, but I mostly had the rest of the summer free. Then I remembered the DiscoverEU scheme and saw that applications would open in May and I would still be 18 that summer! With no one in particular to travel with, and a new sense of independence from my first year at university, I started planning my own solo Interrail trip. At this point, I was pretty set on going regardless if I won a pass or not.

To win a pass, you had to answer a few easy questions about Europe and one subsidiary question that you cannot simply Google the answer to. If I remember correctly, you had to estimate the number of people that would apply to the scheme this year. I made an educated guess based on the data available about the previous year (this scheme only launched in 2018). Then they selected winners based on proximity to the real answer and quotas for each country. I found out later in May that I had been one of the lucky winners (although the ratio of winners was pretty high for UK applicants) and was going to receive my free Interrail pass!

The pass granted me 7 free travel days within a 30 day period, which don't have to be consecutive. This basically means that you can travel on as many trains as you like during these travel days for free (except if there's a reservation fee).

Planning

As a organised person, I quite enjoyed all the time I spent planning and researching this trip. All this advance planning along with the free Interrail ticket (which would have cost about £200) and lots of free accommodation meant that I only spent around £600 overall for this trip of almost 4 weeks. That's travel, accommodation, food, souvenirs - everything!

I also made a detailed spreadsheet and itinerary (including contact info of places I was staying) which I shared with family before departing. This served both useful for planning and safety purposes.

After reading/ watching many other blogs and vlogs, as well as taking into account all the places and people I could stay with for free, here's the route I planned:

I decided to spend quite a bit of my trip in Germany as I had several connections there to stay with and I had been teaching myself the language since January. Staying with friends/ friends of family had several advantages: free accommodation and food, comfort, safety and having access to a free local guide for the area. This also gave me the option to stay in slightly smaller towns that other Interrailers wouldn't normally consider, giving a slightly more authentic experience of a country away from the large well-known cities. However, I also wanted to spend some time completely by myself to experience the true backpacking life in hostels.

I think I chose about the right number of locations for a 3 and a half week journey, although I perhaps could have cut out or spent longer in Vienna/ Prague on reflection.

A few days before I left, while visiting my cousin Juliette, she gave me this amazing little travel journal to document my travels in! I had already been planning to keep a diary but this was perfect for that job, with little cut-outs for each of the places I would visit!

The handy little diary, along with my photos, helped me to me to relive all the memories of my trip to write the rest of this blog series. But I was actually surprised how many details I remembered even without the diary!

I had an Interrail travel diary attached to my ticket which I had to write in just before getting on each train to make the ticket valid. Note that I went on a few more buses and trains than written on it, but I paid for these separately to maximise the use of my 7 free travel days.

Trains, trains and more trains!

I started taking a picture on each train of the trip. This started as a selfie trend with fingers for the train number before I realised I could only hold up a maximum of five fingers while taking the picture and it might be nicer to see some of the scenery rather than my face. It was 18 different trains in total between cities (plus several buses and one plane) with a combined time of over 50 hours.

Postcards

I decided I wanted to get something from each city I visited, and thought postcards were a good idea as they're cheap and easy to find. Only Münster was left out where I didn't have time since most of my time there was spent sleeping. I spent quite a long time contemplating the postcard choice in each place to get a nice looking one that really represented what I'd done and seen in that place. Hope you like my little collage below.

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