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Italy - Verona

Verona Day 1 So farewell Salzburg, home of the Von Trapps and Mozart. The Von Trapps were a real family choir, but there story was embroidered considerably. But I did find a lonely goat turd high on a hill. I'm now on the train between Innsbruck and Brenner. It's cool and rainy with very low cloud, which justifies us skipping Innsbruck and going straight to Verona. The first leg of the journey was east to Innsbruck, then we changed trains and headed towards Verona through the Brenner Pass. This is a combination of river valleys and long tunnels through the Tyrol Alps, lands which are the border between the German and Italian speaking world and have been fought over for thousands of years. We were well into what is now Italy before the houses lost their alpine appearance, and cypress trees and vineyards appeared that gave the land an Italian look. At Porto Nuovo station in Verona, Julie found our new accommodation on Google Maps, and we dragged our trolley bags through th...
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Germany

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 Tuesday 12 September For the last time we got the tram from Jean Jaunes stop to Gare Central and caught the 9.50 2 coach train to Appenweier. There is precisely bugger-all at Appenweier, and we had to wait 50 minutes for the Karlsruhe train, which was 10 minutes late. We sat next to 2 German ladies on there way to see a Tina Turner show in Stuttgart. They assured us that German trains are often late or cancelled, which made me feel better, I think they called it Schadenfreude.  At Karlsruhe we raced to platform 7 and got on the Munich high speed train with 5 minutes to spare. Phew. Twas a very pleasant journey on the fast train, at one time we were going at 250kph. high-speed Tintin hair Munich station had the biggest model railway shop I have ever seen. The prices are eyewatering, the tiny trains are hundreds of euros each. I liked this tiny model of a wedding couple on a Scooter.  At the station in Munich we found the S Bahn platform for Oberschliesenheim where the Air...
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France

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  September 5 2023 Leaving our house to begin the adventure  Northern France is tearing past at enormous speed as our Eurostar heads to Paris beneath a cloudless sky. Just about everyone we know have told us "you do know the Rugby World Cup is on in France, don't you?". I come from Twickenham, the most rugbyest place in the world, I think I can easily avoid the fans in Paris , like I have for the past thirty six years in my home town. There are four fans sat across the carriage and they are all perfectly civilised and haven't opened a single can of beer - yet. Paris is the first leg of our big European adventure by rail, and the exciting thing is we don't know exactly where we are doing. If there is rain in Austria, we won't go there. A revolution in Slovenia?  That can be bypassed. Outbreak of Black Death in Budapest? We will cross it off our list and take our trolley bags somewhere else. The cafe on the train sold Metro tickets, so I bought ten of them for t...
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Hungary

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Saturday 16 September We didn't decide to visit Budapest until last week, when we were in Strasbourg. It was on our itinerary back in August, then we took it off again. Our reluctance is due to it being  6.5 hours from Munich on the train. Then I started reading The Places In Between, which is about Rory Stewart's walk across Afghanistan during the winter. That made me feel like a big softy, and a long journey on a comfy train isn't too much of a hardship. I'm a big fan of Rory Stewart, an incredibly tough polymath and the only Tory politician I respect. As I write I'm in a reserved seat on a packed train on our way through Hungary near Mosonmagyrovar on the Pannonian basin. It's flat all the way to the Carpathian mountains, and is studded with windmills.  Well we are here now, in a small but perfectly formed studio flat in Pest, which is on the eastern bank of the Danube which is (so Google tells us) the cooler part of town.  Having spent 9 hours travelling fro...
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