Trains

1. On Feb. 17, ’05, we went to Gare de Lyon in Paris to activate our multi-country saverpass (seven days, four countries, two people, good for two months) and make seat reservations for travel starting on Feb. 21 to/within/from Italy and Belgium.

FrenchRail (SNCF) said they will not validate passes until the actual day of travel for trains that do not need a seat reservation or until the day you are ready to make a seat reservation for future travel. I told them that we were going to Chartres that afternoon just to get the pass activated.

I took a trip to the U.K. in September ’04 that included a visit to the Isle of Man. Ariving at London Heathrow Airport, I chose to take the underground to the center of the city for £5.40. This took approximately 45 minutes, but it was certainly the least expensive way into central London.

You’ve seen it dozens of times in movies and on TV: a bird’s-eye view of a red sports car screeching through hairpin curves one after another, racing down a precipitous granite mountain with a thousand-foot plunge below into inaccessible ravines. Don’t you wish you were driving the sports car?

Now the camera zooms down onto the sports car, but in this Mercedes commercial it isn’t a red sports car. It is a yellow postbus of the Swiss Postal Bus network negotiating with eardrum-blasting, trumpeting sounds the staggering curves of the Maloja Pass in Switzerland’s Canton Graubünden.

In need of a driver on our September ’04 trip that included Hungary, we were turned on to Gabor Stern (e-mail sabor.s@vivamail.hu, phone 0036-202238630) by the Hungarian National Tourist Office (e-mail info@gotohungary.com).

A very pleasant man with acceptable English skills, Gabor picked us up at the train station in an air-conditioned car and delivered us to our hotel. Several days later he met us on our return by train from an outlying town and took us to Statue Park, waited 90 minutes, then dropped us off in downtown Budapest.

I was in Germany for several weeks in June ’04 and found a wonderful small hotel, Hotel Berlin Plaza, one-half block from the Ku’Damm in Berlin. I would recommend it. I think it’s too small to have “groups,” but the building did have two elevators. Almost all of the other people there were Germans. I had a single room with private bath for €86 (near $110) a day including a good big buffet breakfast. It was a special rate because I stayed 10 days.

I also was in Düsseldorf. I stayed at

—All Aboard is written by Jay Brunhouse

by Jay Brunhouse

My wife and I were very interested to read Dennis Cavagnaro’s article on the River Kwai (Nov. ’04, pg. 24), as we had made a similar trip in September-October ’03.

by Jay Brunhouse

On March 12, ’03, my three sisters-in-law and I began a trip that had been in the making for over two years. We flew to southern France, via Paris, for one week of horseback riding at Domaine du Soleil (Route de Villesque, 30610 Sauve, France; phone 0033-0466804515, cell phone 06-82658301 or e-mail barbara.gahn@wanadoo.fr), a large estate on 70 acres of land and home to horses, goats, pigs, chickens, five dogs and one burro. Each of us varied in our riding skills but shared a common willingness to do our best, not a small thing for four women in their 50s.