You can also find out more about YInterrailing may not be for the young but I used to think it was. Many of my friends discovered Interrailing when I was a young student in the early 1990s. Europe All of them returned to their homes with stories of amazing discoveries. It was something that I had always wanted to do, but never got around to doing. After a few years, I found myself in my late 20s. I had been told by many that the opportunity was open only to those who were under 26.
Fast forward a few decades to spring 2023 and I’m trying to decide where to take my teenage children for our first holiday in five years – a gap caused largely, but not wholly, by the pandemic. In 1981, I had the most memorable holiday of my childhood. My dad drove our family caravan and myself from Nottingham to Pisa over a period of several days. I can still recall the feeling of having my horizons expanded overnight. I would love to share this experience with my children, but I don’t have a driving license.
It was then that I started to see posts from a Facebook pal about their family Interrail trip, from Edinburgh to Slovenia. “But … but … he’s too old for that,” I thought to myself, before the penny belatedly dropped and I hastily checked out the Interrail (Eurail for non-European residents) website. There, After 30 years, I discovered the truth. age restriction is long gone. I had no idea! Interrailing is still available to people older than 26! Although slightly more costly, the cost is not prohibitive. I put together an itinerary for my sons and me and we left a couple of weeks later on a journey of exploration. We did it again in 2024 (to a different place).
In short, Interrailing was a revelation – for me and for my children. Any doubts I may have had about travel broadening the mind were quickly dispelled when, on the first day of our first trip, I saw my elder son’s sheer amazement at the way the departure boards on the metro in Brussels differed from those on London’s tube, or – a few days later – my younger son’s delight at seeing Berlin zoo’s giant pandas.
Mishaps happened along the way. A sick child in Bergen forced a visit to the local chemist instead of a nearby park. What at first seemed like a big problem often turned out to offer a chance to see new things.
After I realized that I had booked us too late on the Hamburg to Kolding train because I had made our plans too spontaneously, I was worried that we wouldn’t make it to Legoland Denmark. It was the jewel of my younger child’s trip. It would have been unforgivable if I had not done my duty. There was another, slower way. sedate alternative to the Hamburg-Copenhagen express – which proved to be an absolute delight, wending its way across the hypnotically flat Schleswig-Holstein countryside and necessitating briefly changing on to seemingly the world’s tiniest train in Tønder, Denmark’s answer to Gretna Green. Although it took us several extra hours, seeing the parts of Germany and Denmark in western Denmark off the beaten rail track was a real adventure.
That ability to glimpse Europe’s more obscure spots is one of the massive advantages Interrailing has over air travel, where you’re whisked from one interchangeable airport to another, going from your home city to the tourist destination of your choice and skipping all that lies in between – the beautiful, the bleak, the places that understandably don’t appear in guidebooks, the messy thrill of actual real life – and seeing only the sanitised endpoints. The journeys themselves were just as enjoyable as the destinations. Oslo-Bergen line, which is habitually – and rightly – described as one of the most scenic Europe, or the Zutphen-Hengelo The line was in the east Netherlands, which it isn’t, but I had the pleasure of being accosted by a chatty passenger who wanted to know what my children thought about Brexit (they were frank) and how the roads of Belgium are doing (they weren’t). For the record, this passenger was neither a Brexit or Belgian roads fan.
This slower pace also has other benefits: It’s difficult to grasp how large and diverse Europe is if you fly over it within the time required to eat an airport sandwich. It can take a whole day to travel across Germany by train. This pace allows you to feel more connected with your surroundings. As we travelled northwards from Calais, to Oslo, last summer on a series or trains, we were able to observe the architectural changes of the churches and houses. Oak slowly gave way beech then spruce before white birch.
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The trip offers a completely different perspective on Europe and its rich diversity. My kids are so hooked that they have already planned their own itinerary for the future, when they will be able to travel on their own. You can guess what we are doing until then. summer. Club 18-30 may have considered me too old long before I was. pensioned offYou’re never too young to Interrail, I realized only late.
