Sometimes there is no option but to holiday alone. You may even have your best experiences that way, as Kirsty Fergusson discovered.
It was 1986. There were four of us, confined to the tedium of a provincial French town of impeccable bourgeois character for the duration of the school year.
Paris was only an hour away by train, but the meagre salaries for twenty-year old English lycée assistants allowed us only the odd day out, spent wandering the streets or nursing tiny cups of coffee.
By January, I was desperate to escape the shuttered town – even if it meant the alarming prospect of solitary adventure. Armed with an Interrail ticket, as soon as lessons were finished on a Friday I raced to catch the early evening train to the Gare de l’Est, and cross platforms to whatever distant European city on the departure board triggered my romantic imagination. If the trains ran on time, I might just squeak back to school ahead of my first class – which started mercifully late on Monday mornings. By sleeping on the train on Friday and Sunday nights, I might stick to a budget of £15 for the weekend.
Vienna was an inauspicious start. Greyish mounds of snow lay heaped along the streets. The icy pavements had been spread with cinders, over which an elderly population, muffled against the cold in grey and black, shuffled carefully. The vast monuments of the Habsburg Empire looked sorry and grimed by age. The youth hostel was almost empty, the Danube wasn’t blue and my suede desert boots leaked. I talked to no one and wondered if solo adventuring was really my thing, after all.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der The Oldie magazine - July issue (439)-Ausgabe von The Oldie Magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der The Oldie magazine - July issue (439)-Ausgabe von The Oldie Magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
Travel: Retreat From The World
For his new book, Nat Segnit visited Britain’s quietest monasteries and islands to talk to monks, hermits and recluses
What is... a nail house?
Don’t confuse a nail house with a nail parlour. A nail house is an old house that survives as new building development goes on all around it.
Kent's stairway to heaven
Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly
Pursuits
Pursuits
The book that changed the world
On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel
RIP the playboys of the western world
Charlie Methven mourns his dashing former father-in-law, Luis ‘the Bounder’ Basualdo, last of a dying breed
Arts
Arts
My film family's greatest hits
Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star
Books
Books
A lifetime of pin-ups
Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on