We separated from our friends Steve and Karen for a few days. They went off to Switzerland to visit a family friend and we stayed one extra night in Rome to do our adventurous Macbook power adaptor shopping, and then figured ourselves the cheapest route to get to Barcelona. Our options were the following:

1. Take an overnight ferry – We pretty much crossed this option off right away… thinking we have Eurail passes that we paid good money for and should use them.
2. Take an overnight train to Zurich and then jump on a train to Barcelona – From our past experiences with overnight trains and paying the extra costs for the private sleeper cabins we decided to avoid this.
3. Take a train to Milan and then catch a connection train to Nice. Stay in Nice overnight and then catch a train the next day to Barcelona. With only having to pay reservation fees this is the route we picked. It sound the easiest for travel and providing a small amount of time in Nice with a good nights rest.

So, the next day we made our reservations, we picked the fastest connection in Milan so we could arrive in Nice with some time to actually explore it a bit. Arriving in Milan, I ask Scott how long do we have till we get on our next train? He tells me we have just under 2 hours. We noticed on the board there was a train leaving in 15 mins to Nice but since our stomachs were growling and we have all learned that hunger overrules all, we decided to get some lunch and hop into an Internet café to reserve a room on HRS.com in Nice. We were taught from my German relatives that this site gives cheaper rates and great specials for hotels then what you would be told by just showing up. To our surprise, they were right and hotels sometimes even proved to be cheaper on HRS.com then booking a hostel room!

We choose a hotel room in Nice that was right across the street from the train station to make things super easy for our early morning train to Barcelona the next day. Paid the deposit fee, grabbed ourselves a McDonald’s ice cream cone in celebration, and headed back slowly to the Milan train station to catch our train, taking pictures of the outside fountain on the way. We were actually quite impressed by the train station… and have heard that is pretty much the only impressive thing to see in Milan.

Licking our cones in satisfaction we look at the board to see what track our train is on, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Not one electronic line of information stated our train number let alone anything saying its destination was Nice. Scott pulls out our reservation ticket to double-check the time and with much swearing advises me he was always looking at the date on the ticket rather then the time!! Our train was actually the one we saw on the board when we first arrived here. Now we just wasted money on our reservation fee and are starting to worry if we can even get to Nice tonight for our hotel reservation with an already paid deposit.

Now our ice cream cones were not as satisfying.. so we pulled ourselves over onto a bench to collect our composure and finish off the cones. What are we going to do? I pulled out our Eurail timetable schedule and we flipped back and forth through the pages frantically. From what we could see there was no more options available to us. I feel like I kept my cool in this whole situation quite well, but Scott was dreading the worse. I think more because he did a mistake of reading the ticket incorrectly and that little mistake lead us to arguing on this little bench and loosing money all at the same time. It was getting quite hard to reason with him to the point we had to just not talk to each other for 5 minutes.

During those 5 minutes I thought to myself while looking at this tiny little schedule book that there is no way it lists ALL the trains in Europe. It must just list the most popular routes and leave the rest out. It would be impossible for something so small to have all the listings for such a VAST train network across 21 countries that accept the Eurail. Once the five minutes past and I could see the vein on Scott’s forehead decreased in size, I explained to him my thoughts and suggest we go stand in the long line and tell the lady we need to get to Nice tonight and see if there is anyway it can be done. Scott doubted the idea but after some more discussion I convinced him to get up and come with me.

Low and behold there was a way to get to Nice. It involved us connecting 3 or 4 times in small town France locations that we can’t even remember and landed us in Nice at 9 pm. Our reservation deposit was not a waste and we were ever so thankful to have a room just across the street from the station. Unfortunately we arrived exhausted and never saw Nice, since our train to Barcelona was at 6 am the next day.

What did we learn in this situation?

• Make sure you are reading your ticket correctly especially if you can’t read the language on it! Maybe even have your travel mate to look at the ticket as well.
• Always double check your train numbers and don’t just rely on checking for the destination on the board.
• The Eurail time schedule you are given does NOT list all the trains.
• Keep your cool if you mess up and miss a train, as there is most likely another option for you.
• Give Scott about 5 minutes if he gets really frustrated and upset before speaking to him with good solution making ideas.

First Class… don’t you just love to say that? First Class!

One of the advantages and disadvantages when purchasing a Eurail pass is anyone over the age of 26 must purchase their pass in the first class category. Which of course means a high purchase price and also a higher price for seat and sleeper car reservations. Now for some reason Scott knew about this and I did not… not even when we purchased it! So it came much to my surprised when Scott casually mentioned on our overnight train to Russia how he was excited to ride in first class once we activated our passes.

First Class! Being myself I doubted what he said saying things like no way! You have to pay extra for that! But low and behold… once in a blue moon, Scott is right. Yes Scott, read over that a few times, maybe you should bookmark so you can read it on a daily basis…

First Class. It was true! Aside from the special we took part of back in UK with Virgin Rail, I have never ridden in first class. In fact when I wrote that blog post I don’t think I even had a clue I would be riding in first class for the majority of our European travels!

So what has first class train travel been like? First class train travel is soft on our bums, filled of huge smiles from the attendants, roomy leg space, quiet, and barely ever have to sit right next to strangers. The bathrooms on the other hand I think are no different then any class. Even to the point that some don’t have any toilet paper and smell like an alley you don’t want to walk down, flushing onto the train tracks below.

First class is also filled with business executives, rich pompous snobs, and retired people. Then there is us… dusty backpacks, sweaty, very simple clothes with a high probability of stains, probably not showered, complete with that loveable “backpacker” tinge of a smell to us. The stares we get are priceless. The best is when someone comments to us as we are trying to find our seats “You know this is first class right?” Yup we know!

Then enter traveling first class as a group of 4. We are all excited and talking non-stop to each other and we are even traveling with multiple bottles of wine, cheese, beer, snacks, and games. You can just tell everyone else in that train car wishes they were us. Smart enough to bring their own bottle of wine, and traveling with some fun loving friends with not a care in the world.

They say you will never forget your first time, and I know I won’t forget the first time we rode a train with Karen and Steve from Amsterdam to Brussels. We got on the train first and snagged the private 6 compartments that’s actually meant for travelers looking for ultra quiet. With the way we looked we were pretty certain no one else would want to sit with us! So we whipped out our little travel speaker, played some tunes, and mixed ourselves a swill of a drink out of the random items we had leftover: Bokma, Red Bull, and some mixed fruit drink. Low and behold in it’s glory:

I think we’re going to get used to this first class traveling!

Should you buy a Eurail pass? It’s not always as easy as flashing the pass…

When we first started planning this trip two years ago, we thought long and hard as to how to travel within Europe. We knew of companies such as Easyjet and Ryanair who have $1 flights between multiple destinations, but you usually have to know where your going and have a route and time frames planned out. And paying for rail each time seemed pretty expensive, but so did the eurail pass. The thought ran through my head many times “Should I buy a Eurail pass?”

After lots of research we thought the Eurail pass would work the best for us. We didn’t have a set itinary, wanted as much flexibility as possible and were sold on being able to see anywhere in Europe at the drop of a hat. There was only a “small” reservation fee on “the most popular” routes so we paid the €2000 ($3000 CDN) total for the two of us and were ready to start using our money’s worth!

I’ve never paid so much money for something to cause such a pain in the ass. The plan was easy: to go from Venice to Budapest on an overnight sleeper train leaving Friday night and arriving on Saturday morning.  On Wednesday we went in to the train station to reserve our seat on the train, but once we showed our Eurail tickets were told that the connection was down and to come back tomorrow. The next day we were told the same thing.

More than a bit frustrated, we went down to an internet cafe to see if we could book online. We found a Eurail fare for €65 pp, but didn’t think that was correct as the full fare was only €130 pp. We didn’t book the tickets because we wanted to talk to the train office the next morning to verify these prices, as it shouldn’t be so much.

We got to the train station at 9am the next morning to make sure we would get the tickets. After queuing in line, I finally got up to the front window only be told the connection was down again. It was quite frustrating walking over to another ticket window, waiting in line, being told the same thing, walking to customer service, being told to just try and get on the train and finally walking back to another ticket window. It seems that there were no more Eurail passes available to be let on the train is what the real problem was.

Sometimes it pays to be nice to the people that are causing you the most frustration. Even though this entire system was BS, we managed to keep our cool and joke around with the lady at the counter a bit. It ended up paying off as after 5 minutes of searching she found us a ticket out of there that night. There was an overnight train leaving at 7.10pm to Vienna, and in the morning we could transfer to Budapest and be there by lunch. We had two options with our First Class Eurail pass: pay €30 pp to sleep in an open car with 4 other people or €60 pp for a private sleeper. At this point I just wanted some peace and air conditioning and agreed to the outrageous price.

Dee and I hopped on our train only to find our sleeper cabin door locked. It’s a good thing we didn’t block the passage with our bags, and I finally managed to grab the attendant and burst into our little private space. It was about the size of a small bathroom, with two bunks that could pull down, sink, small closet, table and an excellent view of the train yard. Never-less it would be our home for the next 12 hours, and jacking up the knob for the AC we cracked open a bottle of red wine to enjoy the trip as we slowly started moving.

30 minutes later we were both drenched in sweat, having opened up the window, door and hall windows for some sort of circulation. Looking around the passageway I saw a mixture of travelers in varying states of undress and hoped I looked better than they did. The thermostat on the wall was somewhere around 40 degrees and the sounds of the train riding on the rails was thundering through all the open windows. I swayed with the moving train and heat waves down the hall until finally finding the attendant. After spending what seemed an eternity trying to speak englitalian, I finally figured he was saying the AC was broken. By that time a crowd formed behind me and nobody was very happy at having to ride another 9 hours with this heat. I pushed my way back to the compartment to break the bad news to Dee and left the mob to yell at the attendant.

So we did what we could and watched some movies as loud as possible to drown out the open window, and went to bed in stifling heat with earplugs that couldn’t block all the noise. Good thing we paid €2000 total for the Eurail tickets and €135 total for the seat reservations!

So far I’m not very impressed with the savings with our Eurail tickets.

I will be posting more thoughts about the Eurail tickets as we go along as they were one of our largest expenditures before we left! Just look under the Eurail category on the right hand side!