Last minute prep for inter-railing trip

Well, it's just after 9pm and I think we are ready for the off tomorrow; my lovely new holdall is all packed and doesn't seem to be that heavy, particularly with the wheels to help, and my husband's smaller case is also packed and ready to go.

Yes, it's smaller but then he isn't taking books, apart from his Bradshaw's 1913 facsimile (familiar to those of you who watch Michael Portillo on his tv rail journeys) which is certainly a chunky volume, and I am panicking that I won't have enough quality reading to keep me going through all those miles on the trains when I won't want to look out at the scenery, or when I'm waiting at stations. Apart from not wanting to waste the opportunity! Hopefully if I get through the three sizeable volumes of literature and I exhaust my interest in reading the thick and comprehensive travel guide to Europe, there will be English bookshops in many of the cities on the route, and a lot of hotels have shelves for travellers to swap books.

I suppose a Kindle would have been a good investment, but I'm not convinced that sitting on trains, speeding across Europe and then having to read from a screen would quite do it for me. I am taking Henry James "Portrait of a Lady," which is one of my all time favourites, and which I last read around 1977. The pace of the prose and the story itself, a gentle unfolding of the reality of what is happening to Isobel, the Lady, just doesn't lend itself to the modernity of a Kindle, so the price to pay is having strict limits on the number of books in the bag with the exciting prospect of searching for and hopefully finding more reading material as we go.

Most of the serious packing has been going on since Tuesday so today was just last minute bits and things that came to mind during the course of the day. Good job we are going tomorrow or that kitchen sink might just have made it into the bag - taps and all!

The main danger of overload though sits with the hand luggage in the form of a small rucksack with quite a lot to be fitted in - including my MacBook, so I can blog regularly; the A4 folder with all the documents for the journey and most important of all, the packed breakfast and lunch, which includes a bottle of fizz, a couple of boxes of chocs, croissants, sarnies (not sardines as the spellchecker wanted to make it!) and fruit. That's all alongside my beautiful travel wallet, a very indulgent ad treasured present from my ex-colleagues and friends, which is holding the passports, EHICs, currency etc, plus the normal contents of my handbag.

Hope you'll visit this blog from time to time as I'll be keeping in touch and sharing our experiences of travels and destinations from Paris to Trondheim.