Planes, trains, & automobiles: a student travels thru Europe

Originally published in the Concordiensis on 2014-11-06.

Drew in Mürren, Switzerland

I’m currently on a plane going from Basel, Switzerland, to London, England, for a layover back to France. Below me, the Rhine River winds by misty hillsides in this region where the German, Swiss and French borders meet. 

It’s the end of a long trip. Switzerland was the sixth European country I visited during my term abroad at the University of Rennes, France. 

My travels began on Monday, Sept. 1, in Sunapee, NH. I put on my turquoise golf shirt and made sure for the 10th time I had everything. My mother wasn’t going to let me leave the house without the proper provisions for the fierce winters in western France. 

From Boston-Logan Airport, my first stop was Reykjavik, Iceland. My friend Stefan and I met up in Reykjavik, because he flew in from JFK. 

Iceland has a plethora of geothermal energy (in fact, the country is completely powered by renewables) and much of the excess energy is used to heat swimming pools. In downtown Reykjavik, we visited a couple of outdoor pools, all of which stay open in the height of winter. We also saw the Blue Lagoon right before we hopped onto our plane to Paris. 

If I’ve gotten an education in anything during my term abroad, it’s been how to work public transportation. All major European airports have train stations, so from Charles de Gaulle Airport, we took the Regional Express Network, or RER, commuter rail into the heart of Paris. 

Stefan and I did touristy things around Paris, like going up the Eiffel Tower and walking the Champs Élysées. I had already been to Paris before, but some of the highlights from this trip were the Musée d’Orsay and the park next to the Palace of Versailles. 

From Paris, we planned to take a flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Rennes, the city where we would be studying.

After strolling around the Jardin du Luxembourg we took the RER train back to the airport. We arrived at Charles de Gaulle Terminal G about 45 minutes before our flight, which was a problem, because Air France check-in lines move like molasses. 

The attendants, for whatever reason, were making phone calls for each check-in. You would think they would have a more efficient system, but this is France, and, of course, Air France was on strike a week later, anyways. 

By the time we reached the head of the line, the attendant refused to check our bags, since it was 1 p.m. and our flight was scheduled to leave in a half hour. What a pain. 

With trains and flying out of the question, I was left with the American solution: rental car. It turns out that 21-year-olds can rent cars in France. 

As a disclaimer, I very much don’t recommend renting a car in Europe unless you are up for the challenge and can drive manual transmission. I had just turned 21 two weeks earlier, so I only had a temporary paper license and my expired license. After being declined by the Hertz affiliate, the Avis guy gave me the go-ahead. 

I’d bought a SIM card in Paris from Free Mobile, a really cheap cellphone company in France, but it provides data service nonetheless, so fortunately Google Maps was functional on my phone. 

Between Stefan, my luggage and myself, the little sub-compact Opel was packed to the roof. Somehow, I managed to drive three hours to Rennes with neither a real map nor a real driver’s license. 

As if getting to Rennes wasn’t enough of an adventure, for a month and a half leading up to my vacation, I had been traveling every weekend throughout Western Europe. 

One of the first weekends of the term, I visited my family friend Katrin in Munich, Germany, for Oktoberfest. I took the TGV, France’s high-speed train system, to Paris, and then changed onto a sleeper-overnight train direct to Munich. 

In any case, Munich is a spectacular city. After running with one of the brewery parades, Katrin gave us an extremely quick tour of downtown Munich. Then she said to me, “Now you’ve seen most of Munich, you should take my car and go see Salzburg, Austria.” 

I guess the drive to Rennes was foreshadowing my drive down the Autobahn. Katrin claimed that her Volkswagen Polo would only go 130 km/h (80 mph), which was probably her way of saying I shouldn’t drive too fast. On one of the straightaways without a speed limit, I did get the Polo to redline at 170 km/h (105 mph) — in the middle lane, mind you. Meanwhile, in the fast lane, Porsches and Lamborghinis were humming by at a much, much faster clip. 

The speed limit on the Autobahn is automated according to the weather and traffic, so as soon as the digital signs change to the no-speed-limit symbol, which looks like a white circle with a couple of white lines diagonally bisecting it, everyone steps on the gas. It’s as if the scenery around you abruptly speeds up, but the cars stay in the same place. I’ve never experienced anything like it. 

After Munich, we did several group excursions with the whole group. We’ve toured around Brittany, the region where Rennes is situated. In Normandy, we visited all of the famous World War II sites. 

Other side excursions I’ve done on my own include visiting the City of Nice, in the Côte d’Azur region, and the British Island of Jersey, right of the coast of France. I’ve been staying in youth hostels, which cost about $20 to $40 per night. 

In Europe, most students have a vacation mid-semester, around Halloween. My plan was to make good use of Ryanair. So with a one-day layover in London at both ends of my trip, I flew from Dinard (just north of Rennes) to Venice, Italy. Stefan, Ashley and I spent a few days marveling over the canals and the Italian architecture. 

From Venice, Stefan and I (Ashley went to Scotland and the Netherlands) took a train to Lucerne, Switzerland, which is a city surrounded by lakes and mountains. 

In Switzerland, Stefan and I bought a Swiss rail pass, valid for all trains, boats and public transport within the country. Even the tiniest villages in Switzerland are accessible by train. 

From Interlaken, we took the narrow-gauge Berner Oberland-Bahn train to the ski village of Grindelwald, at the foot of the Eiger, one of the most prominent mountains in Europe. We even took a train to the Jungfraujoch, the highest train station in Europe, which is right next to the Eiger. 

I’m in decent physical shape, but walking up stairs at 11,000 feet put me out of breath. The view at the top of the viewing platform was crystal clear. All of the snowcapped Alps towered above cow pastures and villages.

After Grindelwald, we spent a night in Geneva, and our Ryanair flight left from Basel. 

Knowing how to speak French has been helpful in France, but I’ve been speaking English everywhere else I’ve gone. 

It didn’t really hit home until my host mother, who can only speak French, asked me what language I was going to speak in Switzerland. “English,” I responded with a chuckle. 

And then there’s the money. Everything in Europe, save health care and education, is many times more expensive than in the U.S. On top of that, the sales taxes in several countries add up to 20 percent (Switzerland was only 5 percent). The taxes were especially shocking for me since we don’t have sales tax in New Hampshire. 

And the gas — yikes! Gas is about $10 a gallon. To fill up a quarter of a tank in Katrin’s tiny Volkswagen cost me around $45. 

I’ve already spent a couple thousand dollars, but considering how much I’ve done in two months, it’s been completely worth it. I may not have many more chances left in my lifetime to explore another continent extensively. 

The term abroad in Rennes has given me an extraordinary opportunity to see Europe. 

My first ski pass

I have early childhood memories, from around age 3, of riding up the J-bar with my father at Pats Peak in Henniker, NH. I really started learning to ski when I was 7 years old, when my parents put me in ski lessons at Mt Sunapee. In upper elementary school, the entire class would take ski lessons every Monday night under the lights at Pats Peak. In middle school, my family would take many ski vacations in Northern New England. In College, our ski club would go each weekend to a different mountain in Vermont and New York.

When I started working in New Jersey, I didn’t have good access to mountains. I would really only ski one or two times a season usually when I would visit family in New England. One time a co-worker took me to Blue Mountain in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t much bigger than the bunny hill at Pats Peak. The first time I ever skied out west was during an extended business trip to Colorado when I skied at Breckenridge. I was there for 2 months in the winter, so I skied nearly every weekend. A-basin was my favorite.

Winter of 21/22, I had just moved back to New England, so I skied a handful of times with friends and family. This most recent winter, I decided to finally break down and buy a ski pass. I chose an Epic Northeast Pass, which gave me access to about half of the ski areas in Northern New England. The other half are on the Ikon Pass, and a few stragglers on on the Indy Pass book.

I have to say it makes skiing much more pleasurable not feeling obligated to ski all day to get my money’s worth. I skied 16 days this season, which is a new personal record. Many of those days were just a few quick ski runs. I liked doing the ski pass enough to purchase a pass for next season. Maybe a trip out west is on the horizon for next season.

No scuba diving on my lawn! A hike at Andrew’s Point in Rockport, MA

Recently learned about this public hiking and shoreline access in Rockport, MA, from this Boston Globe article about the pending litigation between a landowner and the Town of Rockport. Basically one lady is trying to shutdown access to the Atlantic Way, a public hiking and swimming spot in front of her house that has been used by locals for hundreds of years.

The deeds to each of the houses in this neighborhood specify that there are public rights of way between each house and in front of each house on the rocks for public use. We can debate the merits of government conservation land, however as a staunch believer in private property rights, I dearly hope that one rich person isn’t able to steal public land from the town via the courts. This really should be a cut-and-dry case in favor of the town, but money can have its way of bribing the courts.

No scuba diving allowed on her lawn!

I’ve seen a lot of crazy signs, but “No scuba diving [on my lawn]” is a new low for NIMBYism. I’ll tread lightly, but I suspect there is something severely unwell with this lady on Andrew’s Point.

The Atlantic Way is a real local’s gem in Rockpoint and I recommend checking it out if you are ever near Cape Ann.

A week of sailing in the British Virgin Islands

Day 1: Arrival

Island time is no joke. Everything moves at a much s l o w e r pace in the Caribbean and the Virgin Islands are no exception. On vacation, this unhurried mindset can be a welcomed change from the rapid tempo of the Northeast. In January, I had the pleasure of sailing in the pristine blue waters of the British Virgin Islands with a group of friends on a 46-foot catamaran.

My eyes crept open in the Ted Williams tunnel on the 4am Uber ride to Logan Airport. The journey began with a short flight from Boston to JFK. That layover was quicker than a New York minute. Good thing I didn’t check a bag. A troupe of Moko Jumbies—Caribbean stilt dancers—flailing to loud music greeted us at the arrival gate at the St Thomas airport in the US Virgin Islands. What alternative universe had I drifted into?

I met some of the other members of my group at the airport and we found a Taxi van to take us to the ferry terminal for the Road Town Fast Ferry. Keep in mind that is very much a misnomer and that there is nothing fast about island time.

At ferry terminal, I began the mandatory $20 bag check. The gentleman handling the bags approached me and I tried to confirm that my bag was headed for Tortola (which is in the British Virgin Islands), to which I got the response, “No, man, BVI.” I said again, “Tortola?”. He said, “No, BVI”. I gave up when I noticed my friends’ bags were being thrown on the same pile.

The arrival in Road Town, Tortola, BVI, was equally a theater of organized chaos. We waited on the boat for nearly an hour, while the attendants unloaded the bags onto the dock. When we finally disembarked, we waited in the customs queue for at least 20 minutes. We had a brief struggle with the customs officer lady when we told her the marina name instead of the boat charter company we were using. The final queue was for the environmental tax, which you pay in cash to the last jackass by the exit door. (A similar fee is also assessed when leaving the BVIs, so bring plenty of cash). Fortunately they use US currency.

You may sense my frustration at this point. Truthfully, I’m trying to restrain myself as I type this from writing a scathing review of the organizational skills in the Caribbean because the rest of the trip I’m about to describe was quite lovely.

My friend, who would be our skipper for the week and who had arrived a day earlier, picked us up in a rental car. Interestingly, the cars in the Virgin Islands are nearly all standard American left-hand-drive vehicles, despite driving on the left side of the road. The road to Nanny Cay Marina hugged the mountainous coastline and within 15 island minutes we arrived at the boat. The vacation finally begun. I could breathe now.

Day 2: Indian Head & Norman Island

We set sail in the morning and the first stop was Indian Head, a large rock surround by a reef, where we went snorkeling for the first of many times. In the afternoon, we made our way to Norman Island, which had a grotto that we also snorkeled thru. There were countless varieties of fish—even an octopus—that we could see in the crystal clear Caribbean blue water.

Each large boat, including our own, had a small dingy attached to the back. Nearly all of the dingies were small inflatable zodiacs with a little outboard engine, which were useful for going ashore when the catamaran was anchored or moored offshore. And I strongly qualified that previous statement with “nearly” since some of the mega-yachts we encountered later in the trip had dingies that practically looked the length of our large catamaran.

When my friend first had me drive the dingy that day I asked how far I had to be away from people and boats before I could go fast, to which he replied, “There is no rule, just try not to run over the people snorkeling.” In New Hampshire, where I grew up, there is a strictly-enforced law that you must be 150 feet from any swimmer, boat, or shoreline before going faster than headway speed.

The other fact that caught my attention was the licensing. I asked my friend what kind of credentials he needed to charter and captain the catamaran, to which he said, “In the BVIs, all you need is your 10-digit license.” And I asked, “What’s that?”. He smirked, “Your credit card”. As long as you can reach the counter and hand the charter company a credit card, they’ll give you keys to large boat for the week. Unlike anywhere else in the US or Europe, no license or sailing résumé needed. This general sense of lawlessness in the Virigin Islands strongly appealed to my live-free-or-die ethos.

In the evening, we moored in the bay in the middle of Norman Island near a floating bar called Willy T’s. I gazed up at the stars from the opened hatch above my sleeping berth. I had an unperturbed planetarium right above my bed. One thing I quickly noticed is that, in the Caribbean, the bright side of the moon is on the bottom of the moon, rather than the side, forming more of a smily-face shape. Apparently this is an effect near the equator. The phase of the moon is always the same no matter where on Earth you are, but the angle of the bright part changes based on latitude.

Day 3: Cooper Island and Virgin Gorda

Around lunchtime, we made a brief stopover at Cooper Island, which was a sleepy castaway island resort, with a couple outdoor bars surrounded by palm trees and white sand.

By early evening we docked the boat at a marina in Spanish Town, Virgin Gorda. We all took turns using the larger showers onshore in the marina. We learned quickly to take advantage of the amenities at the marinas, since the showers and bathrooms on the boat were quite tight even tho our boat had four showers and four bathrooms for twelve people.

We ate dinner at Little Dix Resort, which had beautifully manicured gardens and pools perched on the side of a steep mountain overlooking the clear blue ocean water. The food was quite good, but the scenery was even better.

We came back to the marina after dark only to realize that we had been locked out of the boat. The door had jammed when we locked it before dinner. Two hours later, some Germans staying on the boat next us helped us break into one of the cabin windows to finally unlock the door. Phew! Everyone was worried that we’d be sleeping outside that night.

Day 4: The Baths and Bitter End Yacht Club

The Baths are a series rock formations on the southern neck of Virgin Gorda. There is a loop that takes visitors thru a series of sandy and narrow grottos finally ending at a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by more rock formations. Only mistake we made was going the wrong way around the loop. We were going against traffic and the oncoming flow of Disney cruise tourists was relentless.

We sailed past the home of Richard Branson, the creator of Virgin Records, on Mosquito Island on the way to The Bitter End Yacht Club, which was our mooring site for the night. Bitter End looked like a nice resort. We walked around in the afternoon and then took the dingy to Saba Rock, adjacent to Bitter End, for drinks and dinner. We met a French family that we encountered a couple days prior. Many people sail the Virgin Islands in the same direction, so it is common to see familiar faces throughout the journey.

Day 5: Anegada Part I

Nearly all of the Virgin Islands are mountainous and have volcanic rock formations—all but one. Anegada was formed on top of a coral reef, which makes it flat. Its geography also makes it more prone to having large sandy beaches.

The sail to Anegada was one of the longer legs of the trip. It took several hours to travel from Bitter End to Anegada. This leg of the journey was the only one that we could not see the destination in the distance. Anegada does not have much prominence above the horizon. Only about 30 min away could we start to make out some palm trees floating just above the horizon.

After our arrival, we got off the boat and rented a pickup truck to get to the other side of the island. The bed of the pickup was outfitted with bench seats, so the entire boat crew was able to squeeze in.

In the distance on the other side of a swamp next to the road, we saw flamingos. For lunch we stopped at a restaurant at Loblolly Beach. This was one of the few times during the trip we encountered some rain showers. The rain hardly interrupted any plans and there also were some occasional downpours at night during the trip. We ended the day at Cow Wreck Beach, which had a nice bar with swings and a giant Jenga game.

Day 6: Anegada Part II

This was our official beach day on Anegada. There is an undeveloped beach on the south west shoreline, which is one of the most pristine beaches I’ve ever been on. We took kayaks from the boat and went ashore. Lots of photo taking ensued because if there weren’t pictures, did it really happen?

For dinner, we had Caribbean lobster at a local restaurant next to the water. Unlike New England lobster, the Caribbean variety do not have claws, but still were tasty. I survived picking apart my half-lobster dinner. I’ve never been a huge fan of dissecting my meal on my plate, even tho I realize this is a rite of passage with lobster.

Day 7: Scrub Island

Scrub Island was the nicest resort and marina that we stayed at during the voyage. Little Dix on Virgin Gorda was arguably fancier, but we only were there for dinner. Scrub Island had a number of nice pools, hot tubs, and bars where we could lounge and look at the beautiful island views across the channel. There was even a water slide that went into one of the lower pools. At night the pool and palm trees were beautifully illuminated with colorful lights.

Day 8: Jost van Dyke

Last but not least was Jost van Dyke. We technically stopped at Little Jost van Dyke first to hike to the Bubble Pool, which was a coral tidal pool that the ocean waves crashed into.

We then continued sailing another 30 minutes to the famous Soggy Dollar Bar, the original home of the painkiller cocktail. The primary ingredients in this drink were rum, pineapple juice, orange juice, and cream of cocoanut.

There was a webcam mounted on top of the bar and my parents were able to find me spot me while at home in snowy New Hampshire.

Day 9: Departure

We returned to the marina in Tortola and reversed the route we had made on arrival. The our taxi from the marina to the ferry terminal in Road Town arrived and the driver introduced himself. “Yeah man, my name is Shampoo,” he said. One of my friends from the boat quickly observed and quipped in French that Shampoo also had no hair. That gave me a good laugh.

At least on departure we were fully acclimated to island time, since getting out of the Virgin Islands was equally a circus as was the arrival. Of course there were all sorts of exit stamps and cash-only taxes, but this was the bittersweet end to a great vacation. 10/10 would highly recommend.

Movie Recommendation: Tetris

Highly recommend watching the movie Tetris that was just released last week on Apple+. I deeply enjoy movies about late-stage communism in the 1980s and Tetris unexpectedly falls well within that genre. Other great movies/series that I like in this category are: The Lives of Others, Chernobyl, Mr Jones, and Deutschland 1983.

The movie Tetris got me thinking about contract law and the power of the state, as it artfully tied the decay of Soviet communism to the video game Tetris. A contract is only as powerful as the goons willing to recognize it. As the Iron Curtain and the legitimacy of the Soviet state began to fall, the legal power of the Western world usurped that of the Soviets.

How I browse the internet

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is an eclectic character in the software community to say the least. He founded the GNU Project, which lead to the development of the Linux kernel ultimately by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds is (quietly) a more significant figure in the history of computing, whereas Stallman is a colorful hippy. For those who don’t know, Linux operating systems power the vast majority of the internet and most back-end servers. The Android mobile operating system is a Linux distribution and iOS/MacOS is also Unix-based, which is a closely related predecessor to Linux.

Honestly, the most intriguing thing to me about Richard Stallman is not his contributions to computing nor his wacky political views but rather his website. Stallman is a prolific writer on his website, which looks like its formatting remains largely unchanged since the mid-1990s. To some degree, Stallman’s website inspired my own. At stallman.org, you can learn about everything from his views on gender neutrality in Spanish, to self-authored French poetry, to his love life. He even posts his former romantic personals listing. Oh la la.

Within the website there are a lot of gems but the page that I find funniest is where he describes how he painstakingly uses the internet.

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. 

If you are a techy, the page will give you a good laugh. Stallman is against just about every useful mainstream website and piece of software nearly to the point of nearly being a luddite because many of these advancements are proprietary. I should not deride Stallman too much because I also am a big believer in free software, privacy, and largely abolishing intellectual property rights.

And now I too will describe how I browse the internet. For starters, I mainly use the Brave web browser, which is a privacy friendly, de-Googled version of Chrome. There are a number of websites that I find myself needing to use Safari for because Brave does too good of a job blocking active (tracking) elements in webpages. On my iPhone, I mainly use Safari out of convenience. DuckDuckGo is my primary search engine, but I occasionally run Google searches. DuckDuckGo conveniently has short codes for accessing other search engines within its own search box (e.g.: “!g” for Google, “!yt” for YouTube, or “!a” for Amazon”). This is particularly useful if you set your default search engine in your browser to DuckDuckGo. More recently, I’ve started to use a VPN, which can shield you from your internet service provider from tracking you. Not as useful against a state actor. For encrypted messaging, I’ve become a big fan of Signal, which I use on a daily basis with many friends. Despite privacy becoming harder to maintain, there is at least growing cognizance about the benefits of privacy.

What am I consuming?

Dark hot chocolate at L.A.Buridick Chocolates in Boston's Back Bay on Clarendon St

I resubscribed to Netflix 3 years ago and it has been my primary TV service since then. I also subscribe to Prime and have access to a former housemate’s Hulu account. I have no desire to go back to cable TV. Here are some of the more memorable shows and movies that I’ve liked since cutting the cord in no particular order.

Netflix:

  1. The Crown
  2. The Spy
  3. The Politician
  4. The Assassination of Gianni Versace
  5. Living with Yourself
  6. Tiger King
  7. Babylon Berlin (German)
  8. The Queen’s Gambit
  9. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
  10. Paul Hollywood’s Big Continental Road Trip
  11. This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist (Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum)
  12. Lupin (French)
  13. The Parisian Agency (French)
  14. Intouchables (French)
  15. The Tinder Swindler
  16. Inventing Anna
  17. The Empress
  18. Somebody Feed Phil
  19. The Last Czar
  20. Unorthodox
  21. Mr. Jones

Hulu:

  1. The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes
  2. American Crime Story: Monica Lewinsky

Other:

  1. Deutschland 1983 / 1986 (Sundance)
  2. Chernobyl (HBO)
  3. Marvelous Mrs. Maizel (Amazon)
  4. Tehran (Apple TV)
  5. Ted Lasso (Apple TV)

How far can you go in a train in 5 hours?

Excellent interactive visualization of 5-hour train journeys in Europe

One of these days I’ll write more about my life and times in Europe. I’d like to think I have a unique perspective having lived and traveled extensively on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some Americans, especially on the left, love to praise everything European. Many right-wingers like to take the opposite stance. Regardless of which tribe you gravitate towards, from the perspective of an unabashed libertarian from New Hampshire, there are a number of categories where western European countries out perform in.

One of these areas is passenger transportation. I’d even go so far to say that Western Europe currently has a much more free market passenger transportation system than that of the United States. Nearly all long-distance highways in France, for example, are leased to private corporations and funded through direct user fees in the form of tolls. Guess what? There are no potholes. European railroads operate on a similar public/private premise.

More well-run options for consumers leads to more competition. Trains, cars, and planes all complement each other nicely. This comes in large juxtaposition to transportation in the United States, which is almost entirely and ineptly run by government agencies. There is little reason reason why 2 to 5-hour car trips in the Northeast could be supplemented with private train travel, even New Hampshire. The population densities are very comparable in this part of the country to many areas in Europe. Sure, we have very car-dependent towns, but this could be easily fixed over time with better mixed-use development and libertarian-esque zoning laws, see Japan.

The United States once had the largest mass transportation system in the world. Nearly all of it was privately operated I might add. The US still has the largest freight railroad network in the world in terms of tonnage. Passenger train travel and freight train haulage peaked in 1917, however the rapid decline of the system did not occur until the late 1940s after the war. The decay was largely attributable to the subsidization of highway projects, which was a boon for truckers, and removal of streetcars, which spurred high demand for automobile ownership. General Motors was largely responsible for lobbying government officials to forcibly remove streetcars and thereby increase car sales.

To its credit, GM did play a large role in helping supply allied machinery during the war. Correspondingly, the attitude thereafter in Washington was: “What’s best for GM is best for the country”. Additionally, more locally, in New Hampshire, there was a lot of resentment by the 1940s by state politicians against the Boston & Maine Railroad, which had effectively held a tight grip over the New Hampshire legislature for over 75 years. Giving rein to the automobile was seen as a way to get rid of the old guard. It’s no coincidence that New Hampshire has the lowest density of rail traffic in the country (except for Hawaii, which effectively no longer has railroads). In fact, it’s by design. The state government wanted to monopolize control over transportation to sweep away the Boston and Maine Corporation. Even Vermont, which has half the population of New Hampshire and less than half the GDP, has considerably more rail activity.

From a purely physics perspective, railroads have profound efficiency advantages over auto roads in terms of theoretical long-term cost (depends who’s running it; ideally an entity with profit motive) effective throughput (freight and passenger volume), and energy use, especially if using nuclear power like what is done in France. It’s foolish to dismiss this fact. Every analysis written on this subject by Cato Institute and even Drew Cline of the Bartlett Institute clearly did not consult a physicist or at least willfully ignored the hard science.

I digress. This post was inspired by this interactive visualization that shows on the map how far you can get in 5 hours by train in Europe. France is a very well-connected country due to the SNCF’s TGV. Germany’s DB isn’t quite as fast, however it is quite good, without requiring the same level of subsidies. In France, roughly half of a train ticket price is subsidized by its central government. I will end that French rail system (especially the high-speed rail system) is heavily subsidized at the opportunity cost of encouraging growth in other areas of society. France is no darling in the perspective of free market economists, however it is light years better in terms of transportation options than that of our current American system.

Scotland (and England)

I would never recommend traveling to the interior of the British Isles in pursuit of exotic food nor beach weather. What I did find on my most recent trip to Britain was rich history, scenic landscapes, and great company. I initially had grand ambitions to do this post as more of a travelogue, but it’s been almost two months since the trip so I’ll stick to the highlights.

In June, I had the opportunity to visit friends who are currently living in York, England, and I knew this couple from my life and times in beautiful central New Jersey. I flew both in and out of Edinburgh, Scotland, directly from Boston, which was a surprise because I thought I was going to have to fly into Heathrow. During my 7 days in the UK, I made several stops on my train tour, which I will elaborate on.

This was my first time leaving the US since covid, and it was mildly interesting to see what the post-apocalypse world looked like, or rather didn’t look like, away from home mostly because it seemed like things had reset back to normal much more quickly than in metropolitan US. Not a soul wore a mask outside the airport. Only place I saw masks was by a queue of people getting on an AirCanada flight, ha! I did not have to wear a mask on my flight, and my only requirement was to have a negative covid test to get back on the return flight. The negative test requirement ended up being dropped the day after my return flight.

Edinburgh

Arthur’s Seat

Best thing: Hike up Arthur’s Seat. The weather the first day was incredible, with blue skies and no clouds, which is rare in Northwest Europe. From the top of this ancient volcano, located directly in the city center, you could see the entire Edinburgh region, the ocean, and the large cantilever bridge that crosses the Firth of Forth. Open, green, treeless fields and hills as far as the eye could see.

Other highlights: Holyrood Palace, the castle, and overall architecture. I ate haggis, which despite the reputation among Americans, tasted reasonably good.

The Scott Monument

York

York Minster

Best thing: Museum Gardens and site seeing near the Minster.

Honorable mention: Gatehouse Coffee. Really cool cafe built right into the city entrance gate. York was a walled city first settled in Roman times. Not a big city in terms of population, but it’s famous among Brits for the history.

What I didn’t get to see: The National Railway Museum. It was closed on Mondays, which ended up being the only day that would have worked. I have a knack for going to famous cities and missing out on great railroad museums. I’m looking at you Lucerne Switzerland. My friends thought I was kidding that I wanted to go to the railroad museum. Trains are a priority people!

Glasgow

Necropolis

Best thing: Necropolis. I’ll admit I was shaking my head at first that my friends were taking me to a graveyard, but the view and the hilltop landscape with tomb stones in the foreground make it clear this is not your average graveyard.

Honorable mention: The food. I also tried a pornstar martini for the first time. Glasgow was surprisingly cosmopolitan, significantly more so than Edinburgh. Glasgow is the 4th largest city in the UK. Did not know. It’s slightly larger than Edinburgh. However, Edinburgh does get more props for interesting architecture and history.

Glasgow streetscape

Fort William

West Highland Railway

Best thing: The train ride between Fort William and Glasgow. The landscape of the Highlands is wild to put it lightly. The rocky unobstructed views with very few trees had some semblance to that of the western US states, albeit much greener and cloudier. The train meandered into uninhabited valleys, save a few random hikers.

Honorable mention: Ben Nevis distillery and the hot tub on the deck of our Airbnb. We had a beautiful view of the town and loch below us. Would gladly stay there again. Ft William is a well known town among Brits, and I’m glad I went to more of a locals destination in the Highlands.

I was gunning for a longer train journey to Mallaig, but 3 hours was long of enough for the rest of the crew this time. There is a famous viaduct used in the Harry Potter films just northwest of Ft William had we continued further on the train. In the future, if I go back to this area, I would also like to see the Isle of Skye.

Airbnb in Fort William

Overall, great trip. Exceeded expectations. If you were to have asked me two years ago what my first post-covid overseas trip would be, I probably would have predicted Norway or Iceland, but the timing was right to visit friends. I came away from with this trip with a much better appreciation for Britain, despite it still not being a culinary destination. My previous trips to the British Isles included Jersey and London, and were very rushed. I had more energy in my college days. This time around was relaxed and I could watch the scenery go by as we lounged on the train.