Plinius x interrail series | Edition 1 | the journey itself

interrailing my way through Italy and France

I have always been a lover of slower ways of travelling: journeys where the ride itself takes centre stage, and there is no single destination. I’ve never really been the type to book one ticket to one place and simply stay put. Partly because I can never choose, there are too many nice places on my bucketlist.

That’s what I love about Interrailing: you don’t have to pick just one destination. It’s also how a simple idea of visiting The South of France turned into an entire Italian–French journey. I could have just booked a return ticket from Amsterdam to Nice, but instead I ended up on this unexpected, incredible route. You can’t help but fall in love with Europe like this:

Leaving Amsterdam in the dark of night and waking up to mountains in the morning light. How cool is that? In less than 20 hours, you find yourself in different cities, across four countries. Breakfast with a pretzel, a panino for lunch, and then arriving in what might just be the best aperitivo city in the world by the afternoon: Torino.

In this series, I’ll take you along on my train journey: starting in Amsterdam, moving through Torino, Provence, Marseille, Paris, and back home again.

This Substack is a little more personal than usual, with a focus on the journey rather than the destinations. In the following series, I’ll take you with me to all the places I visited, but in this first edition, I just want to tell you about the journey itself. After spending more than 35 hours on trains in 11 days, I feel like the journey itself became a destination.

To some, travelling for so many hours might sound horrific. And to be honest, we didn’t always take the fastest route. Due to a lack of planning and an unusually busy travel weekend (a long public holiday), it took a bit longer than necessary. But that is part of it. Eventually, you always reach your destination, and I still found it deeply relaxing.

Because unlike flying, the journey starts the moment you arrive at the station. In my case, Amsterdam Centraal. You can show up just 10 minutes before departure, there are no endless queues or security checks (unless taking the train to the UK) , and you don’t have to worry about liquids or luggage weight. No stress. You just leave.

And the beautiful thing about long train rides is that they force you to do nothing — without it feeling like wasted time. Because you’re still moving from A to B. I love looking out of the window, watching the landscape shift, the weather change, losing myself in thought, reading a book, scribbling notes, or drifting in and out of music.

And then there are the people. Everyone on the train is on their way somewhere. For work, for family, for something personal. I find it beautiful how easily you can connect with strangers along the way.

Shortly after leaving Utrecht, I met an elderly woman, Dutch by origin but living in Switzerland. She was making one last trip back to the Netherlands to say goodbye to an uncle. As we slowly left the Dutch countryside behind, she kept looking out of the window at the country she grew up in, not knowing if she would ever see it again. It felt like such an emotional journey.

I’ve also recently experienced a loss in my own family, which made me realise how everyone is carrying their own story. You never really know what is happening in someone’s life. We can be so disconnected, and sometimes so hard on each other, while in reality we know so little about what someone else may be carrying.

I love these small encounters with strangers on trains. I feel like they happen less and less in our lives. Most people are drawn into their phones. Myself included, since social media unfortunately plays a big role in my life. But on this trip, I really intended to stay offline as much as possible. I wanted to use this opportunity to slow down.

I bought a book I was hoping to get completely lost in — because for me, there is nothing better than becoming absorbed in a good story. I also love talking about books; whenever I see someone deeply immersed in reading, I often ask what they’re reading. That’s how I discovered From Her Point of View by Alba de Céspedes — recommended to me in exactly that way.

It turned out to be the perfect book for a long train journey. One to take with me and not put down.

That is how I ended up in Torino, after a journey of almost 20 hours. I could have travelled to Asia in the same amount of time. But I’m glad I’m here.

It is nice to take some time to get somewhere. Everything in life moves so fast, and it feels almost like a luxury to slow down and enjoy the journey itself.

Reading Alba de Céspedes on a train felt strangely fitting. She spent much of her life moving between different countries, languages and cultures. While I watched villages slide past my train window, I imagined her crossing Europe decades earlier, carrying notebooks instead of smartphones, observing fellow passengers and collecting the fragments of lives that would later become her novels.

Maybe on her way to meet Beauvoir, she even stopped in Torino. Maybe she sat in one of the city’s historic cafés, drinking coffee beneath the same chandeliers I would soon sit beneath myself.

Maybe.

Next up: Edition 2 | Turin Beyond the Guidebooks