You can add the pass anytime before you travel, THEN save a trip… THEN activate it… THEN travel!It makes sense to add the pass as soon as you can so you can start planning trips and saving the train journeys to your trip. Then later you can activate the pass for travel.Registering the pass on your phone does NOT activate the pass.
You could ‘borrow’ a phone for the duration of your trip, or use the paper pass, instead.Best to upgrade your phone, though. New smart phones can be bought cheaply, these days.A nice new Nokia C21 Plus is just £100 on Amazon right now.You can easily switch the app to a new phone. Your pass will only be registered on ONE device, so if you try to register the pass on a new device it will ask you if you want to ‘disable’ the previous pass.I was hoping that I could register the app on both my phone and tablet and that they would ‘sync’ across devices. My intention was to plan my journey on the nice big tablet, but keep all the documents for travel on my phone, but… no go with that!
I’ have taken on board a lot of the advice that I have gotten so far and done a lot more research and have now finalized my trip stops.I have also gotten my rail pass which was 10% off and being over 60 years old helped a bit so that was just £361!I was going to go just for a couple of weeks but have extended the trip to 22 days.The first day of travel will commence on 13th October. (The shoulder season!)All the hotel and hostel rooms are either booked/reserved/paid for.The train journeys will start being reserved closer to the time…(I’ll start booking the extras, etc about 85 days before the actual travel dates.)
I want to see the most amount of countries during this time period.I would ask that you seriously re-think this adventure.Seeing as many countries in Europe as you possibly can is the absolute worst way to travel! For one thing it’s exhausting and secondly, you’ll not really see much! It’s also expensive to travel every day!Try narrowing down your itinerary first and plan on spending at least TWO nights in each major stop.When I was younger (1980s) I travelled from Dallas, Texas to the Republic of Colombia and at first it was my plan to get there as quick as I could… After the first couple of days travelling, I entirely changed my plan and philosophy about travelling.I instead ‘drifted’ all the way down there and all the way back and although it took MONTHS longer it was an awesome trip. I saw so much more and experienced incredible events by slowing down my engine!If you’re from America, and this is your first European adventure, I would steer clear of Spain and Portugal… The reason f
Any specific reason to choose Metz of all? mcadv wrote the above question so I revisited the idea.I still like what I’ve seen so it stays… at least for now!It looks similar to an English cathedral town in some ways, but without the yobbos and crackheads!It’s definitely worth a day’s walk about.
...is also mostly industrial heritage…mcadv said this in an earlier post.I’ve noticed this too, from watching travel videos on YouTube…This seems to happen in a lot of larger cities of course, as railways are used for freight.You have to pick your moments when to look out of the window!
Eerily similar trips to the ones I have planned for the future… especially the Italy one… Starting in Sicily and working slowly up through italy is definitely one for the future.Also the Monaco, Nice and Cannes foray is on my agenda for a future trip. Maybe a ‘one country’ trip to France, as there’s so much to see.I’m still looking toward setting up a ‘base camp’ and doing shorter excursions from it for up to three nights, but not on this trip. This first train journey is kind of a ‘practice trip’ in which I want to try out all levels of accommodation and trains, and also as it’s a pretty ‘comfortable’ round trip (as it stands at the moment) it will build up my confidence to take the more distant and more remote trips later. Just navigating large railway stations in big cities gives me the heebie-jeebies at the moment! (I’ve plotted at least 30 minutes between changes so I can drag myself and my wheeled backpack between platforms!Cheers!
We also stayed in Nuremberg for 3 nights and day tripped a couple of local towns...(Amberg, Regensburg and Bamberg - easy regional trains and a few hours walking round.I like this idea a lot. I’ll definitely explore this option… although, I may save Germany for a 15 day ‘One Country’ trip of its own. Also, as you say, the older you get, the more resistant we become to discomfort and inconvenience.It looks like my final itinerary won’t look much like the one I first posted! The more advice and tips I get (and read elsewhere) the more I learn. 😂
Actually, doing Lille on the return leg is a good idea. I’ve been to Paris (yawn) so I don’t ‘need’ to do that.Also, I had never thought about kicking off at Brussels… I’ll look into that further.The idea of 2 days in Lille was to have a full day exploring it as on the first day/night, I’ll be arriving late afternoon.Also, as I’ll be 63 and not in the best of health, I want to pace the actual travelling so it doesn’t get too exhausting.15 days lugging a backpack every day won’t be much of an adventure.Thanks for adding to my ‘ideas’ list.
Thanks. I'll take all that on board as I refine my trip. I added Metz only because I saw a couple of YouTube videos on it and it was a convenient stop on my 'loop' of a trip. I'll study what you have written and make adjustments after I check them out. I have another eight or nine months to fine-tune my itinerary, and I'm sure I'll be making changes in the run up to departure. Mark
I won't be stopping over in Luxembourg, other than to change trains. So the fastest or easiest route is the one I'll go with. Thanks for your reply. 🙂
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