My European Adventure - InterRail ticket

I recently came back from a two week European adventure, where a friend and I visited 12 cities in 15 days! Yes you read that correctly and yes we realise now that it was a silly amount of places to fit into two weeks, but it was still loads of fun - just stressful.

I will be posting some advise for travelling around Europe in a few days, as I feel like I needed more information when planning the trip.

Flight out of England to Paris 

First of all when we were starting to plan our trip we had so many places we wanted to go, and still had a lot on that list when we actually got on the trip! Words of advice DO NOT try and fit everything in - you will be able to go to Europe again, it's not the last trip you will ever go on! Be selective.

In the end we went to Paris, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Monaco, Milan, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam. It was rushed and manic, but it was enjoyable and I got to have snippets of places so I found out which ones I want to go back to, so I can properly explore!

InterRail Pass and Map 2014

We decided to use an Interail pass for this trip, and it was interesting to say the least. We paid £271 for the 15 days continuous pass, so we could travel on as many trains in one day as we liked. With a lot of stress and naivety later, we realised this pass is actually very expensive when you start paying for train reservations - which were forgotten about till the last minute!

Reservations went from £5 to £50, these probably could have been cheaper if we had remembered earlier but as we were leaving a few days after remembering about them we just tried to get it sorted as quickly as possible. To be honest I don't know why you even have to reserve seats for a train, but that's the way the rest of Europe like to do things so fair enough.

Some reservations were necessary on many of our trips and some that we didn't have a seat reservation for we found ourselves on bar stools or seats that were in the corridor of the trains.

One of our accommodations on a train we got on without a seat reservation - uncomfortable to say the least! 

Most of the trains we got on were nice, with plug sockets and lamps for each seat, also with a tray table and quite a bit of legroom. However others weren't as nice, for example the night train from Vienna to Berlin was the worst train I'd ever been on.

My backpack and I on the last day of my European Adventure

Thinking it would be similar to the ones we had got on before, with plug sockets and lights etc but much to our dismay we found that it had no mod cons, luxuries or even basics! More words of advice would be to get a bed on one of these trains, unless you enjoy sleeping rough. The difference in price is £10 so just pay for a bed! Trust me, you'll wake up after actually having a proper nights sleep and feeling refreshed instead of a few hours kip here and there and feeling like you've been hit with a train!

Over all I think the InterRail ticket is good, but make sure you are doing less than we did - less really is more! It will save you money on train reservations as you won't have so many, it will make life easier because trains are a pain in the arse! (Seeing as we missed two connecting trains as the first was delayed getting into the station!) However with this in mind I do think there are better ways of travelling around Europe - even if it is hiring a car and driving it yourself, or any other way you can think of. All in all just be safe and make sure your mode of transport is right for you and your plan is not too packed!

We took a flight from the UK to Paris

I hope this has helped anyone who is thinking of going travelling around Europe, and in my next post I will be talking about what I took with me and the bag I carried around with me for two weeks!

Have you ever been travelling around Europe? If so how did you find it and how did you get around?
xx