280 pounds later...

I bought my Interrail pass today. It's currently sitting my my right leg, tucked inside a pint-sized Glamour magazine. Shuddup, it was free.

Interrail is the European version of Eurrail, for those who've resided her for more than 6 months. In essence, they're both passes that allow one to travel about Europe on their outstanding rail system. Well, I hear it's outstanding. I'll get back to you on that. Interrail is pretty complicated (annoying) in that you can only choose from the following -

1) 16 day, 1 zone pass (a zone is anywhere from 1 - 8ish countries, depending on the size)
2) 22 day, 2 zone pass
3) 1 month, all zone pass.

I went in to STA travel (the Victoria branch) with the intention of buying 2 all zone passes. One was for this month (May 24 - June 23) and the second was to be for whenever the hell I left the Baltic and arrived in Poland. The idea was flexibility. Yeah, notsomuch. He told me I needed to know the dates I'd be activating the passes (who plans that much ahead?!). I told him I'd buy my second pass in Stockholm. Or somewhere in Finland.

I thought I was rigidly planned. Apparently there are people out there who really do plan this stuff down to the second. The bloke behind the counter laughed at me and said he'd never had anyone have this issue before. But then he told me that most people he sells these tickets to "do" Europe in one month. Yeah. They spend one day in each city, hop on a night train, and go on to the next. Spending one day in each city seems like a waste to me. What can you do, other than dash about frantically? And what if it rains? What if you love it there and want to stay an extra day? What if you miss your train? I wouldn't want to lose out on this flexibility...