Welcome to my little travel journal! I'll try and post these almost every day as we go, but obviously while travelling it might be tricky all the time.

I’m quite a wordy writer, if that’s not for you, you may prefer my companion’s more direct and brief write-ups here

As this is the first issue, I'll quickly introduce our trip. Me and some friends are doing a month long trip through Europe via the Interrail scheme, which will cover almost all of our train fares for a month in a single ticket. In total, we'll be visiting 9 countries, including our start & end at the UK, and almost 15 cities! I'll keep our itinerary a surprise though :)

Starting the Journey

Our journey begins at 4:30 am in London. We're booked on the first Eurostar of the day at 7:01am, so need to arrive at around 6am. This was pretty uneventful, busy but a smooth journey. We arrived in Paris at around 10:30am local time.

After dropping off our luggage at some storage, we first headed to a boulangerie for some espressos/expressos and for me a "croque madame", which ended up being a rye bread goat cheese toastie(?), deftly avoiding the "soiled" public toilets along the way.

We then decided to cycle around on the rentable Velib bikes, which for some reason charge a very scary 300 euro deposit, and got nice and sweaty. We cooled down by visiting the truly amazing LaCrèma ice cream shop! This place serves some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had, and it’s entirely vegan! They have a fantastic array of homemade flavours, at a very fair price - for 6 euros, you get a HUGE ice cream with two scoops, whipped cream – honestly the only giveaway that it’s vegan due to the subtle oaty aftertaste – and an edible hard wafer spoon! I ended up taking one scoop of French Citrus and one of Vanilla - the citrus had an amazingly fresh lemon flavour, and the vanilla was so natural you could taste the crunch of the tiny vanilla seeds. Some other ones we tried are the Greengage Plum, Pear, Apricot, and French Hazelnut. The fruit ones are their best in my opinion, they taste exactly like the most fresh tasty form of the original fruit, just turned into ice cream.

We sat in the Jardin de Luxembourg eating our ice cream, before doing a little more walking around up to Montparnesse. It was a very hot day so there wasn’t too much activity we could do, but it was still fun to leisurely wander around. We hopped on another Velib and took a quite scary (lots of aggressive cars AND cyclists) ride down to Pont Marie, where the Paris council recently introduced an area to swim in the Seine! This was incredibly refreshing after such a hot day, even if we couldn’t stay for too long.

We had to hurry off after this as we had another train to catch to our next destination of the day: Karlsruhe. We have a friend living here who we planned to visit!

Our first intercity international train experience was mostly smooth, though was a little intimidating when these underdressed “customs officers” (3 guys wearing football shirts, unrecognisable apart from armbands) walked down the whole train identifying everyone’s bags. Aside from this, it was a very pleasant journey and welcome rest.

When we arrived at Karlsruhe 3 hours later our friend met us at the station and took us to his apartment. It has a zoo right next to the train station, so it was quite strange walking home and hearing exotic birds. Him and his flatmates then treated us to an AMAZING meal of homemade pasta and mushroom bolognese, complete with local beer and less-local imported Soju to wash it down! It was delicious, and a lovely way to end a very long day.