I’m taking part this week in #travellinkup where the topic is Once in a Lifetime Experiences. I was trying to decide exactly what to write about since “once in a lifetime” usually conjures up the image of the kind of adventure holidays that I don’t really go on, partly because that’s not really my thing and partly because I have kidney disease, so a lot of those kind of holidays are things that I just can’t do. But really once in a lifetime experiences to me are those that take you out of your comfort zone, be it travelling to a new city, or a new country or jumping out of an aeroplane.

Two trips immediately spring to mind. The first was in between ending my degree and starting my masters when I travelled solo around Europe for about six weeks by train. That was back in the days before I had a digital camera so was carrying loads of film around (and lost a whole days worth of photos somewhere!) and staying in youth hostels. My itinerary took me from Paris (which became one of my favourite cities and where I ended up staying an extra day due to a train drivers strike), to Geneva then on to Vienna and up to Berlin (via a night train which was a horribly uncomfortable experience with no working toilet), from there on to Copenhagen and then to Luxembourg City, then Brussels (I hated the hostel so much I ended up booking into a hotel) and then back to Paris before returning home.

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