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Dialogue with my super mom in the summer of 1996 when I was 23 years old; when I told her I wanted to do the Interrail.
Mother I have decided that in September I will go on the Interrail.
What is it?
A train journey, alone, for a month in France, UK and Ireland
Uh, that’s nice, I would do that too.
The one with which it all began
I had never gone away on my own; in fact, I had never gone away without my parents, with whom I had always made trips by car and at most just across the national border. Once the summer season as a lifeguard was over, I took my first solo trip in September, before resuming my university classes, and came back enthusiastically, even if a little earlier than expected.
During those weeks my friends’ moms stopped mine on the street worried about me. Instead, she and my father supported me, and that certainly gave me more peace of mind and conviction. Awesome!!! Thank you.
Doing the Interrail in the 1990s.
That of telephone communications was only one, and not even the most glaring, of the many ways in which travel in that era differed from travel in the present; when I returned to London in 2022 a quarter of a century later, equal perhaps was only the Queen, who died a few weeks later. Doing Interrail back then was obviously very different than it is now. Not only were there no cell phones, no blogs, no google maps and no online reviews; I didn’t even have a paper guidebook. I tackled this trip in a decidedly clueless way, making some egregious mistakes, but I learned a lot, and gained a fundamental awareness of my life.
Aside from the choice of destinations, I certainly erred in going straight to London, which I should have kept at the end instead, and especially there was no point in a one-way pull back.
My macro maps were:
- France
- England
- Scotland
- Northern Ireland
- Ireland
This is my route, meaning the succession of stages, on googlemaps.
Because I started traveling like this
Interrail back then (it has changed a bit now), was a train ticket that allowed travel on many trains and at a discount on faster trains (a few) in European nations, divided into zones. I chose that piece of Europe for a number of reasons.
I felt a certain affinity toward the Anglo-Saxon world. I often jokingly say that in my previous life I was a British soldier, of Irish descent, with a red beard who died in World War II. That is also why I was always fascinated by the Normandy landings. I was curious to jump in and test my English. I was a Beatles fanatic and ingenerally British rock music. But first I wanted to return to Annecy (Haute-Savoie), where I fell in love a few years earlier on a school trip.
I decided on an itinerary that would in theory have me touch the right places to fulfill my main interests, then things turned out differently, but you will see. Now it is almost unthinkable to travel halfway around Europe without using airplanes, but low-cost airlines had yet to arrive and the prices were very high. I took the first flight of my life the following year, back to England again but for a very different experience.
Photos
I did not have a camera and took four of those disposable ones with about forty shots each. Except that, compared to now it was necessary to choose the shot sparingly, all in all the quality of the photos was not despicable. Unfortunately, now the scanning quality of these photos is not very good, but I think they are interesting. For the featured photos of other articles, I had to use artificial intelligence.
Doing the interrail in the summer of ’96 was perhaps the best idea I ever had.
Next step Sleeping in hostels, particularly in the 1990s
Trips taken, travel stories divided by continent
Anecdotes, divided by type in travel narratives
Countries visited in my travel stories
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