Part 1 - Tatras Train Trip - The Last Big Trip

DRAFT

Phew! What a trip, What a holiday!

We saw amazing things, we had great experiences, and we aren't ever doing anything like it ever again! (See the second part of this entry linked here for all the reasons)

This was the final part of a monster-mammoth six week Interrail trip that was planned, booked and paid for in the months before Covid germs were let loose on the world back in 2020.
That was all unbooked and refunded, but a lot of things changed and for lots of reasons it became impossible to go away for an extended period.
So - the trip was sliced up, and diced into smaller chunks, with spicy extra bits added on and we've now completed everything that was on that original list (and a bit more as well).

This journey was to complete perhaps the most distant & tricky part of that 6 week plan, to visit Bratislava, Brno and Dresden. The original plan included Leipzig but didn't include the Slovakian mountains.
Making this into a round trip was not feasible, so I broke my own rules and we flew one way, which turned out to be a great decision (despite my issues with airports).

Coming home with a nasty virus in our pockets wasn't part of the plan, and, along with all other people who consider themselves invincible, wasn't something we'd considered might be a problem!

---

The daily updates of this journey with LOTS of more detail are at this link here - you might need a lot of cake, tea & time for them all!

---

We'd got to the Hilton at Heathrow on the Sunday evening without any drama and were in bed nice and early for a very early start the next morning.
It's all very well getting to the BA Club Lounge bright & early, but nothing or no-one is awake in Heathrow until 5am except the shouty security people, so we were in the queue to get into the lounge before it opened.

BA Club Lounge - you say? We had accepted a very attractive upgrade offer to fly in BA Club Europe class - the short(ish) haul version of BA's Business Class. This isn't big seats & a personal concubine who gives you a foot massage, but rather a seat with no-one next to you (they block out the middle seat), excellent food & drink included and priority boarding.
I'd definitely take the chance to do it again!

Special Assistance (wheelchair help) at European airports is usually pretty seamless, and Vienna was no exception, but the need to find & use a loo on arrival meant that we just missed our train to the centre of the city, and had to hang around in the depressing bunker that is Wien Flughafen.

Track works meant that our originally planned journey direct to Bratislava's main station was interupted by a change of trains at Vienna Hbf. This turned out to be serendipitous.
The slow train from Vienna to Bratislava Petržalka wasn't anything special, and neither was Petržalka station.
Petržalka station was reopened as the main termius for trains from Vienna, but it's miles away from the main station and is quite a way from the city centre.
But, it was a nice day and why not get our bearing by walking toward the city?
So we did.
We walked through some post war housing block estates and bought ide cream from a woman who'd lived in Watford, watched children play, and started to fall in love with Bratislava. The next couple of days exploring the city, and going on the weird hop-on-hop-off golf buggy trips, confirmed our delight in this lovely gem that seems off most Britons' radar.
I'm struggling to say anything bad about Bratislava - except that we had to leave.

I'm struggling to say very much that's good about Slovakian Railway stations though. They announce the platforms far too late for comfort and provide too few lifts or escalators (but they are no better than their Czech neighbours in this respect).

We travelled on into the Tatras Mountains by changing trains at Strba onto a mountain rack railway.
The Tatras mountain range has Poland to its north and Slovakia to the south - you could* walk from one to the other. (*You could, I couldn't!)
We stayed in the ski / hiking / holiday resort of Strbske Pleso which was built for the 1970 Skiing World Championships, and is heavily dominated by 1970s Central / East European architecture (which is not a bad thing).

We walked round the lake, we watched the mountains, we stroked the cat, and we watched a lot of people. We also took the mountain railway to Poprad to buy some food (because the shops in Strbske Pleso assumed you were always eating in the restaurants).
The mountain railway was very nice but doesn't really go 'high' and you get to see a LOT of trees.
We decided that as the mountain railway was so cheap we wouldn't use our Interrail days for this part of the trip.

Have some lake pictures while you make a cup of tea....

We retraced our steps slightly (another rule broken) and stayed a couple of nights in the town of Žilina which is Slovakia's 4th largest city.
It was nice, it had a perfectly square square, and it was a good place to relax, although perhaps we didn't quite unwind as much as we ought to have done.
Take note! The hotel had a pool and yes! I went in it!

All good things come to an end - and our visit to Slovakia was no exception.
Slovakia, let alone its capital city, was a complete surprise, and very much a good surprise. It's a country I'd revisit any time, for any reason.

The Czech Republic or Czechia as it's correctly known, has a different vibe. This is surprising given the history of the two. Czechia is rougher round the edges with more grafitti, more street sleepers, and with a grubbier feel in the air. Or maybe that's just Brno.

During our short stay in Brno we paid a pilgrimage to the work of Mendel who worked there and invented the modern science of genetics. There is a museum to Mendel's work which is possibly the best museum on any science subject I've ever been to - it works on every level. We've brought some pea seeds home.

The hotel in Brno was Very Posh!
A man wheeled our wheely case on his trolley to our room and accepted a random Koruna note.
Our room was the size of our garden at home, and had a great view over the market square - and the market where we bought fruit each day.

Onwards!
Onwards to Dresden where things started going a bit off-kilter.
I'd started with a bit of sore throat and feeling a bit 'off it' but battled on through it somehow.
This meant I wasn't at my best to enjoy the city with its history and its sights. And I got a bit grumpy.
We visited the German Hygeine Museum, which has a fascinating history, and does a good job in an educational sense, but I felt it did little more than scratch a lot of surfaces with no real way of satisfying any curiosity that was excited.
Of course visiting a Health & Hygeine museum is a great place to contract an illness!

Dresden is an odd place.
Because we, with some help from the Americans, flattened the place and tried to kill ten thousands of inhabitans and refugees in 1945, there is very little of the city that is original. It also means that the newly built city - away from the centre - is spacious and green.
The baroque Zwinger palace is a reconstruction from 1948-1963 rebuilt in painstaking detail by the Soviet army, and the historic churches and building nearby have very similar histories. You do have to wonder whether it's a kind of Disneyland.

While my wife was incubating & developing my viral illness we were staying in an apartment hotel, which was OK, but they had the dimmest lights in the known universe - it was impossible to read by electric light in the dark!
We were eating supermarket ready-meals by this stage.

From Dresden it really was a 'Dash Across Europe' - which was just as well because Sacha ( my wife) was feeling really very unwell, and was worrying that she was getting a chest infection - which she didn't.

We went from Dreden to Koblenz, which involved a ride on the route that runs alongside the Rhine - and we did this on a lovely comfortable Swiss train.
I'd chosen the hotel in Koblenz on the basis that it was next to the river with great views. Unfortunately illness meant that we weren't able to enjoy the restaurant terrace except during breakfast the next day - the day we left Koblenz.

My plan included an easy day up to Cologne (Koeln) at this point - which was a Very Good Idea. We spent most of the morning mooching around the riverside in Koblenz and got a lunchtime train to the town of Remagen where we sat in a riverside bar with a lovely glass of coffee and magnificent views. It was a town we'd passed on our 2016 Rhine River trip, and it was nice to get up close and personal.
Of course riverside towns tend to have steep roads between the river and the railway, of course they do!

We stayed in a typical cheap railway station hotel in Cologne - a throwback to the 1980s but comfortable and convenient.
Sacha was starting to want a bit of food, but certainly didn't want a meal, so I set off in search of currywurst, and eventually found the delightful stuff for my tea.

The next morning Sacha was able to get to the station, but was a bit too wobbly to go and look at the cathedral front which faces the station entrance.

Onwards!
The final dash was to Rotterdam from Cologne. This was a relatively easy change at Utrecht to get to Rotterdam Alexander station - we'd discovered in a prevoius trip that by getting on the metro at Alex you don't need to change metro lines, and you have a much shorter walk than if you do the obvious thing and change at Rotterdam Centraal to get to Hoek Van Holland.

And we got to the Hook of Holland ferry port in good time - not a ridiculously early as I'd feared but it's better to be early than a minute late!
Sacha got a golf buggy ride to the ship and I got a 5 mile walk.
I eat my remaining food from the crumbs at the bottom of my backpack for the evening meal and Sacha eat a huge packet of crisps!

It wasn't a great night on the ferry and it may be why I made a strategic mistake once we were on the train heading to London.
I'd always been concerned about the interchange in London (which is why we usually go via Cambridge) so I'd intended to get off at Stratford to get the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon for the short Thameslink hop to St Pancras.
Some dummy saw that the Elizabeth Line and our train connected at Shenfield - which was a far easier change than Stratford (or Liverpool Street) - unfortunately to Lizzie Line is so slow we missed out expected train at St Pancras, which meant that we didn't get the expected soggy breakfast bap on the EMR service to Leicester - we did get sandwiches - and Sacha eat hers with a renewed appetite!

Well, we were home.
18 days awy - and it felt like 180. Read why here.

The cat looked like she'd put weight on, and was incredibly pleased to see us. We were incredibly please to see her, home, and the meal ready for cooking that our daughter had left in the fridge - Oh! Thank You!