RESERVATIONS
In the morning I had breakfast with Margit and Dorothee and then Margit drove me on back roads through the Spessart, a large hilly preserved forest, to Aschaffenburg to catch my train to Celle.
In Aschaffenburg we drove past my army barracks of 65 years ago, before that German barracks and now a technical college.
Several days ago I fretted about not being able to make reservations through my Eurail pass on the trains from Geneva, Switzerland to Aschaffenburg, Germany and from Aschaffenburg to Celle, Germany. As usual when traveling, nothing turned out the way that I expected it to.
First of all, the actual train ticket through the Eurail pass turned out to be very simple once I knew how to do it which took forever to learn to do on line. What I didn‘t know was whether I needed reservations or not in order to get a seat so I went ahead and finally managed on line to get reservations on the two longest stretches of each trip in order not to have to stand up.
On the first trip the conductor wasn‘t able to read my QR code since since Craig‘s printer was a little out of kilter. But it made no difference since the window seat that I had reserved was really so far behind the window that it was hard to see out so I spent almost all my time in the dining car and didn‘t use the seat. So that was $8.80 wasted on a reservation.
It was no better on the second trip from Aschaffenburg to Celle. This time the problem was that when I got to Wurzburg and changed trains to the one that on which I had a reservation, I discovered the train had been cancelled, why, I have no idea. I went to the information desk and was shunted to another train. On the first train I would have had to change trains in Hannover, on the second train I could come all the way to Celle.
In spite of not having a reservation I found a seat and then found out how people handled not having a reservation. When someone came in and indicated that they had reservations for the seat you were sitting in you simply shifted to a new seat. This happened to me and the people I was sitting with at a table, we simply got up and moved. So that was a second reservation wasted. On all the segments of this trip my ticket wasn‘t checked at all.
So now I realize that a reservation is only necessary if the train is packed or you want to keep a group of four to eight seated together. A reservation is not that big a deal and is usually unnecessary. I fretted over nothing.
But the ride was comfortable and the view out the window terrific. The speed of the train was shown on screens on the ceiling of the train where the time to and the name of the next stop was listed. The fastest we went was about 250 km an hour, or 150 miles per hour, but so smoothly and silently that it didn‘t seem that we were traveling fast at all. So the way to get around in Europe, at least for me, is by train. I still have four days of train travel left to use in the next three weeks.
After all this train changing I arrived in the Celle train station five minutes before my bus was to leave for Winsen. With the help of a kind young woman she quickly looked on line, found I was on the 900 bus, and told me to cross the street to catch it. I did and got to the bus stop just as the bus pulled in.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 