The trip that never was!

This is a description of a holiday that was planned, mostly booked and never taken!

It was planned as a grand pan-European odyssey back in those heady days of 2019 & 2020 when the world had never heard of Covid or lockdowns. Ah! Such innocence.

Of course, we were younger, fitter, and a lot less self-aware than we are in the dog-days of 2025.

The trip was planned over quite a long time using and discarding several options, not all of which I have a record of.
The trip was booked through Interrail, Eurostar and Booking-dot-com to depart on the 31st May 2020.
The trip was aborted by Boris Johnson (Whatever happened to him? Why do we no longer have clowns in government?) when he announced the first stay at home order at 8:30 p.m. on 23 March 2020.

There had been rumblings of a nasty viral infection spreading around Asia throughout the first months of that year - and I do remember seeing a few tourists wearing masks on the train from Manchester Airport when we returned from Cyprus at the beginning of March 2020 - it seemed odd then, but what did we know of how the next 2 years would pan out.

We have completed this planned odyssey - more or less - in parts since then. We've done it at a much more sensible pace and seen more than we would have done in 2020 due to travelling slower and staying longer. The bits we've missed are unfortunate, but on the whole, not great shakes in the land of slow travel.

So what were we doing, what didn't we do?

We had booked to travel overnight on our favourite ferry route from Harwich to Hoek van Holland, and then onwards the next day to Amsterdam. We would have had a day in Amsterdam and I made a note to use a hop-on hop-off bus to see the city having dropped our luggage off at the station lockers.
We've since been to Amsterdam for a few hours, and I can't say I'm impressed.

Our onward journey was then by the OBB NightJet service to Vienna. We have done this part of the trip in reverse - and I fear that for us, a night train would have got the trip off to a poor start. We are not fans of sleeper trains See this link here OBB refunded us without any arguments.

We visited Vienna in 2023 and spent four nights there - in 2020 we had planned for a three night stay.
As with most (I say most) of the booked hotels this was refunded without a hitch in 2020.

From Vienna we were to travel to the Lake Balaton resort of Keszthely for 2 nights - the same as 2023, but I'm sure that the weather would have been much better in 2020.

We also travelled between Lake Balaton and Budapest on both trips. In 2020 we had 3 nights booked in Budapest, and in 2023 we found that 4 nights wasn't really enough to get the best from such a great city.

From Budapest we were to travel on to one of my new favourite cities - Bratislava. We visited here in 2025 and really enjoyed the Slovak capital - again 3 nights didn't really do the city justice, but the two nights booked in 2020 would have led to huge disappointment. Curiously - and without planning this - we booked the same hotel on both holidays.

After Bratislava we were to go straight on the Brno in 2020, missing out on out 2025 trip into the mountains. The hotel we'd booked in Brno would also have been a disappointment as it is very close to the station, and the area around Brno station isn't a nice place to linger.
Our two nights here in 2025 were much better (and three would have been better still!)

On both trips we travelled from Brno to the interesting city of Dresden. In 2020 we planned for a change of trains in Prague whereas in 2025 we avoided the huge station in Prague by changing at Omolouc.

We planned for three nights in Dresden in 2020 and four nights in 2025 - with hindsight we'd perhaps got it right in 2020, but 2025 was when we caught a nasty virus and ruined our stay in the German disneyland.
The Dresden hotel was the only one which didn't refund our cancelled booking due to the pandemic restrictions, in the end we claimed it - without fuss - from our travel insurers. This experience has led me to preferring to book where cancellation is free, and had bolstered my belief that travel insurance is essential.

In 2025 we left Dresden to dash across Europe towards home, but in 2020 we were only half way through the marathon.
From Dresden in 2020 we were to visit Leipzig, somewhere we haven't been. We had thought of going to Leipzig in 2025 on a day trip, bit the virus got the better of us, and with hindsight it was quite a long way for a day.

After two nights in Leipzig we were to travel the length of the old East Germany to get to Binz on the Island of Rugen for a four night seaside stay - exactly what we did in 2024. Binz is a lovely resort and unknown by British visitors.

In both 2020 and 2024 we visited (or were to visit Stralsund) as a Hanseatic city. Two nights in 2024 gave us much more time to explore, but again the weather was against us.

The 2020 holiday would have then have had us visit three towns that we still haven't had the pleasure of visiting - Neubrandenburg, Lubeck and Liege. But we have visited Wismar, and Kortrijk as compensation.

From Liege we were to travel to Brussels for the Eurostar back to England. We weren't due to stop over in Brussels in 2020, but we did in 2022. The 2020 plan was the correct one - the area around Brussels Midi station is - is frankly - grim.
We would have been better off going to Lille which has a much better Eurostar experience and has the possibilities of visiting interesting places outside the city which is what we did in 2023, and in 2024 came back from Lille without really leaving the station except to cross the road.

One similarity between the two trips is the 'dash for home' at the end of the main part of the trip. In 2020 this was mitigated in 2020 by a stop in Liege, and in 2025 by a short day between Koblenz and Cologne.

The 2020 trip was planned to be 27 days in length (not the six weeks in my memory) but we've had several other holidays over the subsequent years to complete most of this aborted trip.

The 2020 holiday - in hindsight - had too many single night stays, and not enough breathing space; this is a lesson I think we learned for later trips more by accident than design.
I'm exhausted even re-reading this!