Travelling home during #ashtag

Thinking about trying get home overland?

I just did and thought the world would be a richer place if I shared some thoughts about it :-)

1) Decide if you really need to get home now
This is the critical one. Getting home is going to:
- Cost alot
- Be stressful
- Be frustrating
- Test you physically and emotionally
- If you are in a group - test your friendship. My advice, split up into small, agile sub-groups of one or two if you can. If you can't, seriously consider staying put.

2) If you have decided to strike for home, prepare:
- Get information (e.g. European Rail Timetable, maps)
- Get communication (work out how to use mobile and 3G roaming)
- Charge up your phone (and laptop)
- Buy a couple of books - you _will_ be bored
- Get some cash
- Get food and water
- Make your baggage easy and quick to pick up and run with

3) Work out where the problems are going to be:
- Travel throttle points (e.g. The English Channel; Cologne-Brussels; Copenhagen-Hamburg)
- Accomodation near travel hubs

4) Plan it a step at a time:
- Don't book trains you aren't going to make - it just wastes money
- Pre-book hotels in a few potential destinations and cancel once you know where your going to get to
- Don't overstretch, arriving at a station in an unknown city at 2:00am without booked accomodation is a really bad idea

5) Choose accomodation wisely:
- Make it walking distance to the station (you'll probably do the trip a few times)
- Choose hotels with a good cancellation policy (e.g. 6pm local time)

6) Look at the options:
- Train, coach, hire car, boat, bike, taxi ...
- Do you _need_ to wait in a queue to buy a ticket, will the ticket machine not do the job
- Be flexible, you are probably not going to be able to get your ideal routing

7) Gather local contact numbers:
- The internet is great, but an international call to a domestic call centre will have much better quality information

8) Make decisions:
- Don't mess about. Arm yourself with as much information as possible, make a decision when you need to and stick with it (until you make another)
- Flexibility is the most important factor
- This can be really tricky if you are in a group

9) Talk to people:
- Travellers, Locals, Friends at home, Twitter
- Treat each piece of information as a piece of the puzzle, not everything you hear will be 100% correct

10) And finally ...
- Try to think differently, if one route is the obvious one, work out the possibility of trying another
- Use local trains that don't need a reservation (it might uncomfortable, but you are still getting home)
- Put effort into securing space on the throttle point journeys
- Reduce your stress, pre-book accomodation
- Enjoy it - it's an adventure

I left Stockholm on Friday at lunchtime and arrived in Brighton in time for a beer and a quiz on Sunday. Two and a half days travelling. I got lucky. The ticket to Copenhagen - lucky; from Copenhagen to Cologne - planning; not going to Cologne - judgement; Going via to Amsterdam - good call; Eurostar on Sunday - very lucky. It cost me just over EUR 1,000 all in (almost a third of which was one Eurostar ticket)

Special shout out to DSB (Danish railways) who, as early as Friday morning, decided to suspend reservation requirements and ensure that people got to/from Hamburg - even if they had to stand all the way. Compare and contrast to Eurostar, who didn't manage to even keep their booking system working and didn't allow people withour reservations (which they couldn't make, because the systems were rubbish) to travel, meaning that in the carriage I was in, 15% of the seats were empty.

I wish you all good luck.