14/11/2024
For the last 3 & a half weeks I've left the flower farming to my brilliant team, and I've been off inter railing around Europe with my husband enjoying Switzerland, Italy and France.
It's been an amazing experience, 32 years since we last interrailled, and we visited 16 different places, on 17 trains, travelling 3159 kilometres and spent many hours looking out over lots of different European landscapes. Here's what I learnt about myself, and how that will help in my flower farming and in keeping myself fit and healthy in the coming year.
1) I love silence....... While I really enjoyed our big city visits to Zurich, Luzurn, Bologna, Dijon and Paris I find the bustle and noise of a city exhausting. Standing back on the field the last couple of mornings with the mist hanging in the valley, and just a very distant background noise of the M25, I found a lot more relaxing than negotiating busy city streets. I'm going to lean in to that, and enjoy the silence more.
2) I love a good public transport system, and a pedestrianised town centre. Zurich excels at this, with trams and buses and funicular railways all included in their day tickets. Alassio in Italy was an amazing set of pedestrian streets with all the shops restaurants and bars reached without having to negotiate traffic. Bologna was pedestrianised at the weekend and there were so many people on the streets, I'm not sure where the cars went Mon-Fri. Both of the above meant that we have gone 3 and a half weeks without getting in a car, which also means our step count has gone up. Which also means this is the first holiday where I haven't put on weight, despite enjoying the best of the local food and wine wherever we were. 🤔 walk more, drive less, get more healthy...
(and yes now we are home I can say that ALL the trains ran when they should, we didn't miss any connections, and the latest any train was (ironically) was 15 minutes late into Zurich on our first day.)
3) I love a map, and a statistic. Whenever we got to a new place, I was quite obsessive about finding the physical map, so we could cover as much as possible and not miss out on the best sights.(yes google maps did get used, but I also learnt I hated paying for roaming charges every day, so not all the time)
Last year I didn't do as detailed a map of the field as I normally do, so 2025 will be the year of the field plan, with colouring in, and numbers and dates. I'll make sure I post them on here.
Thank you to the team at Byway who organised our accommodation and tickets (no campsites this time round). It was a wonderfully grownup way to see Europe, and I'm sure it's not the last time we'll be interrailling.
