Me, myself and Interrail – a solo train trip around Europe

11.09.2023 - 09:15 / theguardian.com

Does there come a point in every marriage when you realise you don’t know your spouse very well after all? For me, that moment came not when watching yet another ill-judged birthday present shoved to the back of my husband’s wardrobe, but when I noticed a half-price sale on Interrail passes and decided to book a pair for what I felt sure would be an excellent and perhaps even romantic late-summer adventure.

I was deep in planning reverie, weighing up the merits of chasing the sun in southern Europe versus getting hygge in Scandinavia, when my beloved announced that sitting on trains for a fortnight was the opposite of what he considers a holiday.

It was only then that I read the small print and learned there would be no refunds and no name changes. There was only one option: I would go alone. It was a slightly daunting prospect, though I recall once being a very independent person, travelling the world for the Guardian on assignments that included a memorably disastrous undercover trip to Myanmar.

I remembered my first foray into Interrailing as an idiotic 18-year-old in 1999. I ended the month no longer on speaking terms with my travel companion, a boy from my A-level German class. I could see the benefits of going solo, with no one to argue with about whether to pay the supplement for the fast train to Milan, or the wisdom of sleeping on the platform for an early departure.

We were on such a tight budget then – £15 a day for food, accommodation and those sneaky supplements – that we wild camped some nights in urban parks. It was character-building stuff, especially when we were robbed as we slept in Cologne by a selective thief who ransacked Daniel’s rucksack but took nothing of mine.

Twenty-three years later, I set off from my home in Stockport with a more generous allowance of £100 a day and absolutely no intention of kipping in any parks or stations.

It is probably worth pointing out at this point that Interrailing is no longer a particularly cheap holiday unless, perhaps, you get half-price tickets and your husband comes with you to split the hotel bills. A second-class global Interrail ticket for travel in 33 countries now costs €704 (£605) for a month (€528 or £455 for 12- to 27-year-olds). The further away from London you live, the better the value, because the ticket includes an outward and inward journey in your home country. With a peak time open return from Manchester to London now costing a scandalous £369.40, I recouped more than half a full-price ticket simply by travelling in the rush hour.

It’s also not quite the spontaneous holiday you might imagine, at least not when it comes to crossing the Channel. Eurostar only offers a limited number of seats for Interrail pass holders