GoKawiilLast year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December.
Here's how our journey ended up:
The trip included two ferries - one overnight - which had a small Interrail discount. In total we spent approximately 40 hours on trains over a 7 week trip.
This blog post looks at the practicalities of the journey and the experience we had while travelling. You are free to decide which cities you want to visit and which you want to skip. This worked (mostly) for us - you should write a blog post about your own experiences.
Eurostar St Pancras is dangerously crowded and needs tearing down. You can use RealTimeTrains to see your departure platform before it is announced - that's useful for avoiding some of the queues.
The first-class service in Eurostar is lovely (even if it doesn't get you access to the lounge). Unfortunately, you need to book vegan meals a few days in advance - a deadline I missed. The veggie option was fine though.
Made it to Brussels where we hit our first snag.
We'd booked some of our tickets months in advance. What we hadn't realised is that construction work had been announced and our train would be getting is much later than we anticipated.
Neither Interrail (who we booked the seat reservations through) nor DB (who had our contact details) thought to tell us about the change in journey. Nevertheless, we jumped on a train and had a pleasant enough trip up to Germany.
The Interrail refund form is ridiculously complicated and asks for various screenshots. There really ought to be a big "DB Screwed Up" button for an instant refund. Still, after a couple of days the refund came through.
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