I had a very strange trip in October, and I almost didn’t embark on the voyage. Sometimes, I wish my company¹Non-profit had a travel agent who would make things go smoother. You know, I could be that travel agent. Maybe. But probably not.

There were interesting incidents on that trip²Why do I only write about traveling? that make me think. That is one of the best reasons to travel. It is not just to see the sites³Many are worth seeing even if I rarely take the time to look, it is to take a moment to understand the world is bigger than your neighborhood. It is bigger than the places you usually inhabit. It is stranger and scarier than I realized until this trip.

I almost cancelled. You see, apparently one war in Europe wasn’t enough to get our travel restricted. But a second war broke out right before I was supposed to embark on this trip. I was given carte blanche to cancel and attend my meetings from my basement at 3am. It was attractive, but two weeks in Europe was also attractive when I considered buying my own wine and waking up in the dark. Even post pandemic, attending remotely means not hearing all the side conversations in the room.

And so, I went. I promised not to leave my hotel after dark. That was a harder promise to keep than I expected. It was October, and it gets dark around 7pm which happened to be the time I stopped working for the day. The hotel, while very nice, recently changed their restaurant so it was healthy⁴I didn’t want to to try the “beyond meat” or even order in a restaurant where gluten was verboten.. I survived, but I wasn’t so happy about it.

I have this habit of being very cheap⁵Can’t say frugal really about the strangest things. I had a bad experience in 2019 when a train was cancelled and it cost me $19 to get my $43 back. So I am reluctant to make train reservations too far ahead since I no longer trust refundable tickets. 

My cheap nature worked out for me leaving Cologne and getting to Strasbourg. Pro tip when searching for train tickets in Europe: it is not a good idea to put in the first two or three syllables and hope that the correct city comes up. It almost always doesn’t. I was searching for Offenburg, but the tickets to Offenbach were much cheaper. The app wouldn’t let me book my ticket all the way to Strasbourg because Strasbourg is in France and I was in Germany⁶On this trip, I would step foot in Iceland, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Iceland before my feet would make contact with the ground in Virginia again.. There were two places I could change trains to get to Strasbourg: Offenburg⁷Note: Not Offenbach or Mannheim. Unfortunately, when I put in “Offen..” it suggested I wanted to go to Offenbach⁸And I am glad I didn’t take the train there as it is no where near Strasbourg. Thankfully, I did not buy that ticket or the ticket to Mannheim.

I really wanted to transfer through Mannheim because it sounded right. It did not, however, feel right. I rarely think about trusting my gut. There are too many strange things in the world that I don’t understand. I thought I would be able to keep up with the news about the threats of terrorism, but I really couldn’t. I read a little French and less German, and my news feed is full of Taylor Swift and Amy Dickenson⁹Normally I love this, but I don’t think Taylor is going to help me out along this journey. Her songs helped some.. I gave up and decided to travel to Offenburg and buy a ticket to Strasbourg form there. My hotel in Strasbourg was only 18 miles¹⁰or maybe KIMS from the Offenburg train station, so the worst that would happen is that I had to pay too much money for a taxi¹¹Still not a fan of taxis..

This is where a travel service could have helped me out. Maybe. I could have paid 20 more Euros for my ticket, and then I wouldn’t have had to think about it so much.

While on the train to Offenburg, we did not go through Mannheim like we were scheduled to. I have no idea what even happened to close those train tracks. I hope it wasn’t a terrorist attack, but I will never know. Instead, I got to Offenburg and easily got my ticket to Strasbourg¹²In a strange twist, I had to use the same app to buy the ticket it wouldn’t let me buy when I was in Cologne. I guess I had to be there?.

There was another train ticket I still had to buy, and in hindsight I realized saving 5 Euros might have been a really bad idea. When taking the train from France into Switzerland, I probably should have used the French train system to buy my ticket. The ticket was about 5 Euros cheaper buying it from the Swiss train network, so I got the ticket from there. When I got to the station, I learned my train was cancelled. I checked my email, and yes I had a notification. In English it just said the train was cancelled. In French, it let me know it was because there was an abandoned bag on the train and they thought it was a bomb. Not cool¹³I sort of regret studying French.. At the station, the ticket office was closed, but I saw four soldiers with machine guns around the different entrances. This did not make me feel particularly safe, even if their purpose was to keep people safe.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I had something to distract me. The French kiosks, TER, would not read the ticket issued by the Swiss train system SBB CHF¹⁴No, I do not know what either of those acronyms stand for.. 

If you have not taken a train lately, when you board, you find your seat. Then you sit. On the German trains, you can check yourself in using the app¹⁵It’s called Comfort Checkin. In the US, and in other countries, the conductor comes by when they want to. Sometimes it is quickly at the first station. Sometimes, a conductor never actually checks your ticket. On the way to Basel¹⁶On the French train, they never checked my ticket. I suspect it was because there was a monitor that said anyone on the train departing for Basel at 10:51am should take the 11:51 train.

On the train to Zurich, my ticket was checked. The conductor noticed it was the wrong ticket, but he believed me that my train had been cancelled and just scanned the QR code and gave me a smile.

You know, last summer, I had one of my colleagues who has a travel department to call when he gets stuck have that travel department fail him. When his plane was cancelled and the travel department could not find them a hotel room, he was told to sleep in the airport. I, undaunted, found him a room three stops away on the Metro which let him get 6 hours of sleep which did not involve airport benches. 

I am an Agent of Travel, for others anyway. It is time to embrace I can serve that function for me too!