The kind of adventure you can't have anymore - Interrail 1995
The plan wasn’t much of a plan
If you’ve ever wanted to know what it felt like to be free, truly free, I recommend Interrailing in 1995.
There were three of us: Matt, Felix and I. We’d just graduated from Oxford Brookes and planned a trip built around one month, one ticket, and not a single phone between us. No itinerary beyond a creased paper map. No reservations made in advance. No digital trail to check or follow — simply because that technology didn’t exist yet. Just a rough clockwise loop through Europe and a shared instinct to keep moving, wherever the rails or our whims happened to take us.
Amsterdam to Berlin, Berlin to Prague, on to Munich, down to Nice, back through Paris, Brussels, and eventually London again. Apart from Prague, I'd been to most of them before, either as a kid or during my Gap Year four years prior. The trains were our skeleton key, unlocking every city we could reach before sundown, or just after it. Accommodation was found the old-fashioned way: campsites (we had a tent), walking until we spotted a hostel, Tourist Information, asking locals, or in the case of Nice, stumbling into a budget hotel for one night near a shop aptly called Felix-Martin.
Travelling without a net
We had a rough itinerary but played it a lot by ear. Maps were pulled from pockets, folded and re-folded until they resembled soft tissue, the cities slowly wearing themselves into our memories through the repetitive motion of trying to orient ourselves.
We didn’t think of it as a challenge, or some attempt at retro purity. There was no romanticised yearning for analogue or disdain for digital, it simply hadn’t arrived yet. I think I may have brought a CD Walkman or a minidisc player, plus a few carefully chosen albums. I think I was the only one with a point-and-shoot camera, my Ricoh I got on my 18th birthday, loaded with a 24-shot roll of Kodak or Fuji. And I think we brought some cash and then used travellers’ cheques cashed at bank counters with queues and stamps and nervous smiles. If you needed to call home, you’d hunt down a phone box and hope it hadn’t swallowed your last coin.
Phones stayed at home because they didn’t exist. Our only tether was each other and keeping our valuables at close quarters the whole time.
People came and went
Other people drifted in and out. We visited Matt’s brother, who was working in the army, for a night in Germany. We met Felix’s friends in Paris. We ended at my sister's tiny flat in Brussels. Most strangely, we kept crossing paths with the same group of girls in different cities without exchanging any contact information—just a verbal hope to see you there and the strange rhythm of Interrail that made the continent feel smaller and friendlier than it had any right to be.
The moments that stayed
Between us, we took maybe three rolls of film. No backups, no cloud, just a handful of snapshots that we had to wait weeks to develop once we were back. And yet I can recall whole days with absolute clarity. The street food in Prague, the noise and rattle of trains overnight, the bleary-eyed sunrises in stations and on beaches, the handwritten directions on the back of receipts, the long conversations about everything and nothing. And of course many funny moments that can't be shared here but always come up again when we meet. These moments, unspectacular and unscripted, somehow stayed with me.
Lightness, not loss
I often wonder why. Perhaps memory does more when it knows there’s no external storage. When you’re not performing your life for anyone else, not documenting it in real time, the moment becomes something you actually live. There’s something about being unreachable that makes you more present, more porous to the world around you. Maybe it’s not silence that creates clarity, but the absence of expectation.
The amazing thing is that it really wasn’t that long ago. Not the post-war era. Not the sixties. This was the mid-nineties. Blur and Oasis were climbing the charts. Email existed, technically. But for most people, the internet hadn’t yet arrived in any meaningful way. You could still vanish into Europe with a rail pass and no plan, and nobody would think that was odd. It was just travel.
A one-off, by accident
That trip was a one-off. Not because we didn’t want to do it again, but because the world changed so quickly. It became harder to go off-grid. Easier to check everything, plan everything, monitor everything. The idea of just turning up at a train station with no booking and no plan now feels almost reckless. But it wasn’t then. It was just travel. And it gave us memories that weren’t captured so much as engraved. That being said, Matt and I did another trip across Ireland a few years later, also before social, but that’s another story.
I don’t think we need to travel like this all the time. But I do think everyone should do it once. A single journey without technology, without expectations, without performance. A journey guided by instinct, shaped by people, and remembered by the feeling of being there, not just by the photo that proves it.
We didn’t call it slow travel. We didn’t call it anything. It was just how you travelled when you didn’t know any different. And I can still feel it in my bones.