Books & Links to dream, plan & travel by

All the planning for this trip entails a lot of reading. Well, for me anyway; but then, I also love to read.

So here is the list I kept promising, split the way it split at the time: the things that made me want to go, and the things that told me how.

For wanting to go, Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts is still the one. An eighteen-year-old walks from the Hook of Holland towards Constantinople in 1933 and writes it up forty years later from memory and a lost notebook. Nobody has bettered it on crossing Europe slowly. Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There is the opposite register and just as good company, a man being rained on in Hammerfest and complaining beautifully about it. Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar if you need reminding that a train is a thing to stare out of.

For how, Rolf Potts' Vagabonding came out the same spring this was written and has aged better than any of us, because it is about time and money rather than gear and timetables.

For the nuts and bolts, one site beats every book: the Man in Seat 61, one person's obsessive and constantly revised account of how to get anywhere by train. If you read one page before booking anything, make it his guide to using a rail pass, which is where the reservation rules live.

The books hold up. The timetables never do, which is exactly why they belong on a website and not on paper.

Posted 14 March 2003 by Ant in Eurail Blog Archives · updated by Chris