Throughout the month I am writing and thinking about travel. As part of that my weekly moments of joy are all from holidays and travel. Last Sunday I shared with you a moment of joy from a memory from a photograph I had found of days on the beach with my Dad. This week I want to share with you a moment of joy from my first real experience of independent travel.
As a young 19 year old after a year spent working whilst retaking an A level I was let loose with then boyfriend now husband to travel through Europe on a train. We were going ‘inter railing’. In those days Interrail was a 30 day train pass that entitled the bearer to travel anywhere in Europe for 30 days. I’m not sure if it still exists today but in those days Interrailing was definitely a thing.
Up until this point I had only left the country on 3 occasions, a school trip to Paris, a church youth group trip to the French Alps and a holiday with my then boyfriend, now husband’s family to Spain. I was hungry for travel, and Interrail was the way feed that hunger. Our sole intention was to visit as many countries as possible, and spend as little on accommodation as possible. We were on a strict budget!
This was in a time way before internet and mobile phones so after our parents dropped us in Dover to catch a hovercraft, we were on our own. Two teenagers from a tiny village in Norfolk going to find the big wide world. We had not booked anywhere to stay for the whole month, we had no way of contacting anyone other than by public pay phone or letter and we were on our own. Except of course we weren’t, we had each other and our trusty Guide to interrailing in Europe book which we had been inwardly digesting for weeks leading up to the trip. Our rucksacks contained little more than this book, a selection of cheap t-shirts and shorts bought from our local market, sheets we had sewn into sleeping bags. We were told we would’t need sleeping bags. They were wrong, we did. Sheets are not warm enough when sleeping on the open deck of a ship crossing from Italy to Greece. In our innocence we presumed it was warm all the time, everywhere in Europe, it wasn’t. We also had a wad of envelopes containing cash in various currencies to get us through France, Spain, Morocco, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia (as it was then), Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Belgium.
Leaving the UK was fine, leaving Calais not so easy. We found another group of inter railers, tagged along with then got on a train we thought was going to Paris. Turned out it wasn’t, and after about 10 minutes, we ended up back in Calais docks. Not to be put off at this early stage, we heaved our rucksacks back on, got out walked across the railway tracks and found the right train which would take us to Paris and a month of adventure.
During that month we slept on platforms of train stations, on the decks of ships and shared sleeper carriages with Italian soldiers who were not their way to do military service. We lived primarily on bread and cheese, We shared pizza in Vencie. We got scared in Morocco, we stayed in a decidedly dodgy pensionne in Rome and we fell in love with a tiny beach called Agia Anna on the Greek Island of Naxos, which we returned to later on an island hopping tour of Greece. We sent post cards home from every country we visited and we arrived home suntanned, braver and more curious. We were in love not only with each other but with travel and adventure too. We still are.
Here is where you can read about lot more of my moments of joy.