adventure travel

getting back from Germany yesterday was a bit of an adventure, but we made it! That's me, two kids, seven items of luggage including a very large African drum, and all that on trains overcrowded with stranded air passengers. At one point our train to Brussels was 100 minutes late:



but at the end of the day, and after some further struggles with the usual "lines closed due to scheduled engineering work" that hits UK rail services every weekend, we came home just one hour later than anticipated. Feels like a real achievement, given that this has probably been the worst travel chaos to hit Europe in living memory.

Following the news I was also intrigued re. how many people use pointless short-haul flights in a country that has an excellent network of intercity trains with services every hour and guaranteed connections on the opposite side of the same platform. Entire football teams, I learned this weekend, routinely fly to their away matches, even if the trip is only a couple of hours by train. Serves them right, now they have to share overcrowded trains with their drunken fans.