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Recap of my 2024 Interrail cross-European trip

A month and a half after my European Interrail trip, I finally feel like writing my recap. Phew!

In short: it was amazing, you should do it too, and train travel is the best.

And now, a longer version…

  • steps: 403 036. That’s a bit less than 270 kilometers, with an average of 13 434 steps per day, with a busted knee.
  • train: 4 836km, around 2 days and 19 hours.
  • places visited: 7 countries, 15 places
  • books: 31 books in 30 days.

Revisit the whole trip from this page!

places

In one sentence:

  • Turin: Grenoble but make it Italian
  • Bologna: orange and satisfying
  • Venice: not overrated, but too busy to be worth the trip
  • Trieste: amazing, once you’ve accepted you’re not in Italy
  • Ljubljana: soft and sweet
  • Lake Bohinj: quiet and beautiful
  • Lake Bled: busy and beautiful
  • Zagreb: messy and fun
  • Budapest: pretentious, but with good reason to be
  • Berlin: great public transportation to take you from one mildly disappointing place to the next
  • Munich: no redeeming qualities whatsoever
  • Salzburg: cute, if you’re a millionnaire
  • Verona: extremely underrated, except the parts that are extremely overrated
  • Rome: lives up to the hype

Places I’d like to visit again: Ljubljana, Bohinj, Bled, Rome
Places I loved, but feel like I don’t need to visit again: Turin, Bologna, Berlin, Salzburg, Verona
Places I wouldn’t visit again: Venice, Munich

My mom should go to Trieste.
My middle sister should go to Ljubljana.
My youngest sister should go to Turin.
My dad should go to Bohinj.
My partner should go to Bologna.

trip ideas I got on the way

  • Visiting all European Winter Olympic cities (looking at ya, Sarajevo)
  • More Italy! Mooore!

castles on hills with a river below

  • no hills: Bologna, Venice, Berlin, Munich, Milan
  • no river: Trieste (but a nice seaside castle with a hilly garden, so we’ll allow it)
  • several castles on hills: Salzburg, Verona, Rome
  • the castle is a ski resort: Bohinj

food

  • best food: Verona
  • food i wouldn’t find at home: Ljubljana
  • worst food: Munich (i did say no redeeming qualities)
  • food that was good but made me sick: Turin
  • food i then learned to cook at home: Rome

packing

My packing list.

shouldn’t have brought:

  • the warm technical underwear – a normal light sweater instead for layers
  • probably could have replaced the sleeveless shirts with technical t-shirts

should have brought:

  • a second sweater
  • the fleece jacket that I originally packed and then removed with a lot of optimism
  • a warmer neck warmer
  • an N95 mask, instead of buying one in a panic midway through the trip
  • very light summery pants for church visits

really glad I brought:

  • laundry soap
  • technical t-shirts that don’t smell and dry fast

books

Here’s what I read in April 2024. All of these books were loaded on my e-reader.

Non-fiction

Fiction

❤️

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