First day...

Hello there! I am writing this from Frankfurt, halfway through our first full day. We spent 10 hours of yesterday travelling (Oxford-London-Paris-Frankfurt); but it really didn't feel that long. All 3 of our trains were clean, punctual and very comfortable. The highlight had to be our ICE train from Paris l'Est to Frankfurt, which had very little plastic in sight, lots of legroom and generally felt quite luxurious. Cattle class it was not! Deutsche Bahn generally gets a lot of thumbs up from us.
There's generally not a lot to do in Frankfurt but we've occupied our time quite nicely; and we're off to Leipzig in an hour... One odd thing is they have chip & pin set up everywhere, but nowhere seems to use it... Twice we have signed for payment and once not even that!

Planning our route

Europe's a big place - where to go? As previously mentioned, the idea of the holiday has been around for a long while, but plotting where to go exactly has only been a last 12-month kind of thing, mostly done this year really. So, how did we decide?

- Going to further-away places. We tried to avoid places that were too close to the UK, as they would be easier to have separate holidays to. We will have passes to go anywhere in Europe; so might as well go a long way.
- If either of us wanted to go somewhere, then we would go there - even if the other person had already been there.
- Mainly stick to cities - served by faster trains, of course.

So with those theories in place, our route planning went something like this. First up, Rebecca wants to go to Colditz, this is near Leipzig so we decided to stay there (some interesting things & places nearby too). I wanted to go to Venice, as it is a truly unique location. Also I wanted to go to Andorra - I've been there before briefly and thought it was very pretty, so wanted to take Rebecca there too. Rebecca wanted to go to Versailles (near Paris) so that was fine and it obviously doesn't take much effort to fit that into the itinerary at the start or end of the journey. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that this breaks our "don't go to places too close to the UK" rule, but we have had a holiday to Paris before and didn't visit Versailles (I have been there before) and we agreed on that holiday that we would go to Versailles on the Big Trip. It's a nice place anyway, and apparently now free for under-26 EU residents :)

With the "must-visits" in, Rome and Vienna soon got added to the list as generally famous places with much to see, and also they fitted in reasonably with our existing locations. Also I stumbled across this hotel whilst on the excellent seat61.com website, and when I showed it to Rebecca she agreed that we should definitely go there if possible. Looking at all these places on a map, we had most of the route sorted. The remaining places we plan to go to (Munich, Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt) were basically chosen due to being en-route between other places and also for generally looking like interesting places to visit (well, less so Milan, but we're only staying there one night). And thus was the itinerary finalised; well apart from two nights in south France, which we are not deciding on until we get there, just to be a little crazy :)

Dates and photos

Someone approached me today with surprise and worry as they thought we had already left for our holiday & were worried that our holiday had been called off for some reason! The concern was touching but just to clarify, we are not leaving until Thursday August 27th. We return in the last week of September.

In other news, we now have our photo store set up properly - the link is on the left and you need a username and password to access it. I think I have given out a username & password to everyone who wants one, but if you haven't got one then drop me an email. I think the name of the game is to just check there regularly once the holiday starts - I'm not sure that I will point out in the blog posts every time it gets updated.

How it all began

I suppose the first proper post on here should be - where did the idea for the holiday come from?

I've enjoyed train journeys for as long as I remember - from the very rare journeys when I was a child to the main mode of long-distance transport it has been for me since I was a student. For me, train travel is fun, and I think it was sometime whilst being a student that I thought it would be fun to spend a month on trains, going around Europe and seeing lots of places.

At the end of my second year, I spent 10 days in France with a couple of friends from university - going by train to 4 different cities. It was probably the most fun I've had on a holiday in my life and only reinforced my vague dreamings of a holiday around Europe. But that's all they were - vague dreamings. For a start, where would all the money come from? And I would need at least one person to come along too - part of the fun of the France holiday was being with friends, being able to pick who to go on holiday with rather than going with the family every time.

Then along came Rebecca. We fell in love and we were soon engaged. At some point during our engagement, I mentioned to hear my dream of spending a month going round Europe by train, and she agreed that it sounded a wonderful idea. Excellent! So I had someone to go with :) (I should make clear this is not the reason why I married her!)

The money was, of course, still an issue, so back then in 2006, we set ourselves a date of late Summer 2009 to enact our plan. The reason for the late summer was that it hopefully wouldn't be too hot (neither of us are fans of anything over 25 degrees really), and secondly the fact it was in 2009 would give us plenty of time to save up money for it. 2010 was not really an option - as then we would both be 26 and thus be adults rather than youths in the inter-railing universe, adding £352 to the cost of two inter-rail passes (price correct as of posting).

And now we're almost there, late summer 2009! To say I'm excited after all this waiting and anticipation doesn't quite cover it.

Welcome to The Big Trip blog!

Hello one and all! Here is the blog for our big holiday this summer of 2009. It will be lasting 4 and a half weeks, feature over 4,000 miles of train travel, sleeping at 13 or 14 different places and be the holiday of a lifetime, to bore people about for years to come. The idea was first agreed upon over 3 years ago, so we've been looking forward to this for a very long time. Many people have suggested that we keep a blog and keep people up to date, so I've decided to go ahead and do this.

The reason I'm keeping this separate from my main site is, basically, so I don't advertise to the world that our flat is empty and available for anyone who wants to empty it of our possessions. After we are back, I will link to this blog from my main site.

Finally, if you look at the right we will hopefully be posting some links there, showing our route and hopefully links to our photos as we go around. It's all a bit in-progress at the moment though.