After spending a few hours in Ljubljana, I went back to collect my bags from the locker room and got on a bus to Bled, Slovenia. I was going to be spending two nights here. My hotel was Hotel Krim.
Lake Bled, Slovenia
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Tag Archives: backpacking europe
A Fantastic Afternoon Spent in Ljubljana, Slovenia YAY Funicular
I have absolutely nothing written in my diary from Slovenia. Luckily, I am armed with pictures to remind me.
I left Croatia very early in the morning. The views on the train ride from Zagreb were absolutely stunning. I want to live here:
I got to Ljubljana, put my bag in a storage locker and took off. This was the first place I found canned iced coffee. ICED COFFEE. I had been craving it for so long. I drank it in like one continuous gulp.
Ljubljana is beautiful. It also features my three favorite things: bridges, funiculars and castles!. I love bridges, I love funiculars and I love castles! Continue reading
Croatia – Zagreb and Plitvice National Park – May 2012
I left Budapest when it was still dark out, headed for Zagreb, Croatia. My time in Zagreb was really to visit Plitvice National Park. I had gone back and forth so many times between staying in Zagreb and staying at Plitvice. Staying in Zagreb meant it was easier to leave once my Croatia stay was over. Staying at Plitvice meant it was easier to get to the park. In the end, I opted to stay in Zagreb.
I boarded the train at Keleti Station and found my seat. Someone was sitting in it. I try and show him my ticket and he will not acknowledge me. Fine, I’ll just sit across from you. His body language told me my presence annoyed him. Well feel free to move…out of my seat….
My train was one of those trains that had cabins with six seats in each cabin. I don’t like these trains. I don’t like facing someone, being locked in a cabin with a stranger. Well okay you aren’t LOCKED inside a cabin with a stranger, but that’s what it feels like. I had just really wanted to sleep for the bulk of my six hour trip, but having this person directly facing me inside a locked cabin (okay again, not LOCKED) made it awkward.
At some point, the train stopped and a very menacing man in a uniform came and barked at us in a language I did not understand. Turns out we were crossing into Croatia and needed to show our passports. Yay! Croatia stamp in my passport!
Booking European Train Travel
My first European train ride was taking the train from London to Brussels. It was so easy. Despite living in New York, or maybe “because I live I New York”, I was expecting complications. Well Europe is very unlike New York. In New York, I have no idea how tourists handle the subway, let alone commuter rail elsewhere. The subway is never operating fully as it is supposed to. Never. There’s always trains skipping stops or going over other lines or whatever. In Europe, you are taking this train; you look for it on that sign, and get on it. That’s really it.
My first ride, we got on the train in London and got off in Brussels. We then took a local train to Geel, which was the town we were staying at. We had to transfer two or three times. Even this was simple. There are preprinted timetables all over the place and most of them tell you ON A PREPRINTED TIMETABLE what track you will be on. Because the train always comes on that track. Really?? because I have taken the Long island Railroad from Penn Station fifty bazillion times in New York and its always on different tracks every time. What a novel concept, the train runs on the same track all the time, to the point where it can be labeled correctly on a preprinted schedule! This was so easy!
Once my fear of living my life was completely wiped out by this trip, I was able to start work on my second trip. This trip would be a real trip. Not a starter trip, not a “cling to Rachel” trip, not an anything other than “I’M GOING TO SEE THE WORLD!” trip.
Planning train travel can be a huge pain. Right now I am working on my upcoming trip. I am going from Paris to Naples. I checked flights and on the day I want to go, it leaves at 6:30 am. so id have to be up by at least 4:00 am to get up, get dressed, go to the airport, go through security, land in Naples, get to my hotel…..pass out from being so exhausted and probably not be ready to go anywhere until evening…..after which I would probably not be able to sleep at night since I had napped.
My other option is to spend all day on a train. Honestly, this may be my preferred option, although I haven’t fully made up my mind yet.
Bahn.de has all the schedules you need. But they do not sell tickets for routes that do not include Germany. So then you need to figure that out. There are so many options out there and you should check routes and prices on all of them. You should also keep track on where you saw what price. There is nothing like spending two hours pricing everything only to find out you now don’t remember what website you found that $13 ticket from Milan to Rome on.
To give you an idea, when I had still been planning to go to Bern, and then from Bern to Italy, I had to check prices on both the Swiss train website, then on Italiarail and Trenitalia. These ended up being the options:
Bern to Naples 7:34-15:55
Train# 51 Departs Bern at 07:34 and Arrives Naples Centrale 15:55
$163 italiarail
$185 sbb.ch
But by not buying one ticket and instead buying a ticket for each leg:
Bern to Naples 7:34 – 16:43
Bern to Milan italiarail $32 7:34 – 10:34
Milan to Rome italiarail $52 11:00 – 13:55
Rome to Naples italiarail $13 14:39 – 16:43
total = $97
Bern to Naples 14:00 – 18:15
Bern to Milan italiarail $32 7:34 – 10:34
Milan to Naples italiarail $55 14:00 – 18:15
total = $87
Bern to Naples 7:34 – 00:05
Bern to Milan italiarail $32 7:34 – 10:34
Milan to Naples italiarail $13 15:05 – 12:05
total = $45
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Buying one ticket for the full trip is way more expensive than buying a ticket from Bern to Milan and then a second ticket from Milan to Naples. If you had started out on the sbb.ch website and saw a ticket for $185 and booked it without looking any further, you would have overpaid greatly.
Even with doing two separate tickets, there are still multiple options. All leaving Switzerland at the same time, all arriving different times, all different prices, all found on different websites. It pays to do research.
First Stop on First Solo Backpacking Trip: Prague, Czech Republic
So here we are, the morning after Groezrock Festival ends. I wake up in Geel, Belgium at 5:00 am to the sound of church bells outside my window. I am ready to go and get started on my trip.
Today is by far the worst travel day of my trip, but it needs to happen to get me situated where I want to be. I am going from Geel to Brussels Midi. From Brussels to Frankfurt. From Frankfurt to Nurnberg. From Nurnberg to Prague. It’s fifteen hours of traveling. In addition to that, it includes a bus ride. For some reason, the bus ride intimidates me. I don’t know why. I’m like that even back home in New York.
I wake up and walk to the Geel train station to start my long day. At Brussels Midi, I grab some breakfast and figure out where I am going. It is at this point while standing on the train platform, that I realize my ticket actually has information on it that I didn’t know it had. You know, because the ticket is in German and I do not speak German. It turns out that on the ticket is the car number and seat number. I knew I had made a seat reservation but I did not know how to read the ticket. I asked a conductor for help and he pointed this out to me on my ticket. He also showed me how to tell where each car is going to be when the train pulls in. From this day forward, I now know that I can use Google translator to figure out my pre-purchased train tickets and find this information. Easy, peasy!
Brussels: Belgium and Geel
After working a full day, I went straight from my job to JFK Airport and boarded a flight to Brussels. I had a layover in Dublin. I arrived in Brussels at 9:25 am on April 27, 2012. I don’t sleep on planes, I have never been able to. When I landed, I had been up a number of hours I was way too exhausted to do the math for. Also bonus: when I landed, the clock on my phone was an hour behind. I have no idea why. Someone suggested it was because of daylight savings time. Well don’t phones get the time from a satellite or something? It was so frustrating because I was so exhausted. I could not figure out how to manually do the time. I didn’t want to change the time to another time zone to get it to appear right because what if it auto corrected? Then I wouldn’t know and was looking at some other country’s time zone. I have so many trains to catch this trip. I need to know what time it is! I am so tired please god please AH YES I FIGURED OUT HOW TO MANUALLY DO THE TIME YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHH.
So despite having my first meltdown before even leaving the airport, I wanted to see some of Brussels. I collected my luggage, got my passport stamped, took a train to Brussels Centrale and ditched my luggage in a locker. I was really happy I had Euro coins with me leftover from my last trip so I didn’t have to scrounge for change to do this.
Did I mention I was exhausted? All I wanted was a large iced coffee. Everywhere I went, that’s all I could focus on, never got it.
I walked around Brussels a bit and took pictures. Most of them ended up not coming out. I can see the thumbnails but I get an error when I open them. We like to call this “act like it’s not happening”.
Brussels has a casino that I could not find for the life of me (this is probably best). I was able to find Mannekin Pis though, so that was good.
Budapest, Hungary
The train to Budapest was actually quite enjoyable. The seats were very comfortable and they were out in the open and not inside a cabin. I do not like cabin seating. I don’t want to spend hours face to face with someone.
I arrived in Budapest at midnight. I walked outside. It is POURING. I thought I found the metro but I wasn’t sure since there is absolutely no signage outside. I wait and finally break my hatred of asking people for help. They tell me yes, this is the metro station. Thank you.
I go downstairs, burning hot. The escalators are very fast, this scares me to death. I don’t know what it is but recently I’ve started to get scared of getting on escalators going down. It’s the stupidest fear and it developed right in time for me to go to Europe with these super speedy down escalators.
Vienna, Austria
I am really glad I kept a diary. If I had to write this from memory, today would start out as “took the train from Bratislava to Vienna, dropped my stuff off in my hotel and hurried to see Prater Park because I could not wait to ride the Riesenrad!!” But reading my diary, that not what happened at all.
I took the train from Bratislava to Vienna. In my diary, as I’ve mentioned, I write down all the intermediate stops and times we are supposed to stop at them. Despite this, I ended up questioning myself as to where to get off and ended up staying on one stop longer. Then I had to figure out how to get back to where I was supposed to be. It turned out I had to take a commuter train back to that stop and then continue following my directions for the subway. I did all of this with my stubborn insistence of never asking anyone for help. It’s funny how I don’t remember the annoying mistakes I had to deal with.
Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic
Another huge highlight of Prague was my side trip to Kutna Hora to see the Sedlec Ossuary, the church made out of human bones. I had seen so many pictures of this and could not wait to see it in person. The train was easy peasy. The walk to from the train station was also easy as google had led me to a blog where someone clearly laid out walking directions, which were way easier than following a map.
In case you are wondering – you get off the train. Follow the crowds though an underpass under the tracks to exit the train station.
Try and stop to look at the map and find yourself unable to because there’s too many people in your way.
One Night in Bratislava, Slovakia
Bratislava is a destination I had never even heard of until I went nutso on eBay and bought around 25 European guide books just because they were a dollar each. I cannot express just how uneducated I was on Europe before I started making plans to see it.
Many books will tell you that Bratislava is not worth an overnight stay. Now that I’ve been there, I can also say the same thing. But you know what? I like being able to say “It’s not really worth an overnight stay” and have me saying that be based on me doing it. I love all the knowledge I gained on my trip, even if it’s only stupid little things like that.