Memories from before the lockdown (part two): A nostalgia trip with my mum

This was one of my favorite holidays ever.

Not just of the trips I have documented on this blog, or in recent years, but in my lifetime.

A bit of background information. I was born in Germany to two Irish parents who were living in Heidelberg, a beautiful university town in south west Germany. I only lived there until I was 5, and as German nationality rules were (and still are) extremely strict I have only ever held Irish citizenship. I grew up in the south side of Dublin and have always considered myself Irish, but an important part of my identity has always been that I was born in Germany. To this day I speak fluent German and that part of Germany will always hold a place in my heart as something of a second hometown. While I'm most definitely a Dubliner, I am also definitely a Heidelberger.

My memories of that time are obviously quite vague but as my first ever memories, they are also important. We made regular family holidays to the area when I was a child, and my parents have maintained friendships they made in Germany to this day, including the people who used to look after me as a toddler and the parents of my earliest friends when I was in kindergarten. Over time my family's and my own connection to Heidelberg obviously became more distant, and until this year I had not been back since I was a child.

I'd been keen to go back for a long time, but I guess the opportunity just never seemed to present itself. Then towards the end of last year I came up with an idea... I was struggling to come up with a Christmas present for my mum, but one idea I came up with that I really liked was to book a holiday for the two of us to go to Heidelberg, visit some of her old friends and have a lovely little nostalgia trip around the town where I was born. In fact I loved the idea, I was 99% sold except for one fact. If you've read my other posts you'll already know about my flight free 2020 commitment... and while it's easy enough to travel from London to Heidelberg by train, it's another thing to do it from Dublin, and yet another to expect my mother to do it.

So after toying with the idea of booking myself train tickets and my mum a flight, in the end I couldn't do it. Booking someone else a flight felt very much against the spirit of my flight free plan, and booking a holiday by rail from Dublin to Germany for my mum felt like it might go down like a lead balloon. But I brought up the idea over Christmas, and explained why I decided not to book it - she was keen on the idea - and even to traveling by train; but not so keen, as I had suspected, on making the entire journey without a flight. The boat and train leg from Dublin to London on her own was, in particular, a potential step too far.

But we reached a compromise. I would book us a holiday together, traveling by train from London to Heidelberg... but she would be responsible for her own travel from Dublin to London. To ease my guilt about being responsible for a flight she combined the trip with a trip she already had planned to visit my aunt in Kent. It was one of my mother's closest German friend's birthday at the end of February, and her own birthday in March, so I booked train tickets and hotel rooms for a trip at the end of February as an early birthday present.

My mum in turn got in touch with a variety of old friends and basically organised a full 5 day itinerary for us. Dinners, Lunches, a couple of quintessentially German "Kaffee und Kuchen" (coffee and cake) meetings in the afternoons, and some spare time to do some shopping and just explore on our own.

Panoramic view of Heidelberg town centre

...And so once again I was at St. Pancras station. To catch the 11am train to Amsterdam - not to travel to the Netherlands - but because I think it provides the easiest connection at Brussels to the German ICE trains on to Cologne and Frankfurt. This was the first time my mum had traveled through the channel tunnel, though, so it was more exciting than usual.

Arriving in to Brussels, the connection was not quite as easy as it has been for me before, when the DB train was literally waiting across the platform. We did have to change platforms, but only to the next one over. I had reserved us two window seats in a compartment that we shared with a Belgian/ German family, my lasting memory of which is feeling that each parent seemed adamant to raise their children in their own mother tongue. Of course they both also spoke perfect English and insisted on speaking to us in English despite it essentially being a tri-lingual compartment.

By this stage me and my mother were speaking the universal language of hunger, to be fair. The desire from our stomachs to get some lunch far outweighed the desire from our brains to practice our language skills. So the conversation not only naturally happened in English, but also quickly turned to weather or not the restaurant car would be open yet. The German mother assured us it didn't normally open until the train was well out of Brussels, but it was only one carriage away, so mum decided to go and have a look.... and it was open! but already quite busy, we would have to share a table. Fine by me!

We shared our table with a very friendly English man traveling from London to Berlin, who recommended the Currywurst as "about as good as you can get, from a microwave". We shared the table and a nice conversation, him drinking alcohol free German beer, while we indulged in the alcoholic equivalent. We spoke about life in Germany, rail travel, and shared a small but meaningful moan about Brexit. He spoke to the train staff in broken but extremely endearing German and definitely left a positive impression.

For the rest of this leg to Cologne, however, I was preoccupied with an attempt to co-ordinate a secret surprise. After booking my tickets and planning the trip, my sister (a professional cellist) had taken a job with an orchestra she plays with on a 'carbon neutral' tour. Instead of flying or using coaches, they were traveling around Europe by train. It just so happened that she was traveling back from Poland to London on the very same day. Not only that, their train from Berlin was due to arrive in Cologne at almost exactly the same time as our train, and both our connections left from adjacent platforms.

We had both kept the co-incidence secret from our mother, and if our trains were both on time it would make for a wonderful surprise. We arrived on time, and I led mum to the connection's platform without mentioning the secret rendezvous. The news from my sister wasn't good though. They had been delayed, and by the time we got to the platform it had got even worse... the train had been held just outside of Cologne due to trespassers on the line. I had to break the secret and tell my mum. Sadly, we waited on the platform as the Berlin train never arrived, and watched the Thalys train for Brussels depart without the Orchestra on board.

In the end, the orchestra had to spend the night in Brussels, and catch the first Eurostar to London the following morning. Our connection to Heidelberg was the next train on that platform, an 'old fashioned' InterCity train that I had chosen specifically, not only because it provided a direct connection to Heidelberg, but also because it followed the old scenic route through the rheine valley, one of the most scenic rail journeys in Europe and one I was keen to share with my mother at sunset.

One of the drawbacks of the old fashioned loco hauled trains is that when reserving seats you don't actually know which way the carriage will face. I not only wanted to reserve window seats for this leg, I also wanted to make sure we had a view of the river, so it was just as important to make sure we were sitting on the left hand side of the train. The solution was simple, though. Due to the fact that you can buy a country wide 'BahnCard' railpass in Germany, you can reserve seats for quite a small fee without actually having a ticket - so i simply reserved two sets of seats, both in the same carriage but on opposite sides. When we got on board we simply took the seats on the left side of the carriage.

The weather wasn't great, but we still got to enjoy some good views. The idyllic sunset vision I had in my mind didn't quite materialise, however, and a further death knell occurred half way through the scenic section at Koblenz, where the train was held due to a passenger falling ill and requiring medical attention. By the time we left the station it was pitch black and half the journey was now in darkness. Furthermore, and more annoyingly, due to the delay the train was re-routed via the high speed line out of Mannheim and consequently skipped Heidelberg, thus immediately nullifying the other advantage of this train; a direct connection to Heidelberg.

The short hop from Mannheim to Heidelberg is incredibly easy; just a short trip on the local S-Bahn commuter service, but it was a crowded trip on a commuter train towards the end of rush hour that we could have done without. Still, we arrived in Heidelberg in good spirits and with more than enough time to find the hotel, check in and have dinner at a local tapas restaurant.

The next 5 days were, as I described, a wonderful nostalgia filled holiday that all in all are quite unrelated to the topic of this blog. It was also a very personal experience between me and my mum, that is hard to express in words. Some of the obvious highlights would be visiting the playground I played in as a child in kindergarten, meeting the people, who looked after me while my parents were working, for the first time in 30 years, or sharing coffee and cake with a pair of women who shared their experiences of living through world war II, one in Germany and the other in Japan. But the less obvious are just experiencing the town that formed the background of my earliest formulative years, having an intellectual conversation in german with my dad's former work colleague and the pride of being able to immerse myself in german language and culture and hold my own.

The return journey has got to be one of my favorite rail journeys of all time. Obviously it helps that it was the end of an amazing holiday, but it was also seamless, ran without fault and was a joy from start to end.

I opted for a different route back, that didn't involve the scenic rheine valley, but was nonetheless carefully thought through and planned out. Like the outward journey, I planned only two connections, and factored in even more time to make connections for potential delays (I think this is even more important on a homeward journey!). This time I opted for the even older main-neckar route along the "Bergstrasse" (one of the oldest in Germany), via Darmstadt, to Frankfurt, where we would then catch two high speed trains to brussels and on to London. We skipped the bottleneck of Mannheim altogether and spent most of the journey on dedicated high speed lines.

The first train was another old fashioned InterCity train, but I had reserved two seats in a compartment. After a bit of confusion finding our compartment we found our seats and had a very pleasant journey on the short trip to Frankfurt, where we arrived on time and had more than enough time for a toilet break and to grab a coffee. The ICE3 train was waiting at Frankfurt and once again I had reseved seats... and I had tried to reserve what I think are the best seats on the train - one of the limited number of compartments on these ultra modern trains, but specifically the 5 seat compartments (as opposed to the usual 6).

The layout of these trains are not always exactly as they appear on the booking systems, but on this occasion it was exactly as expected, and to top things off, we had the entire compartment to ourselves for the whole journey. The dining car was also right next door, so we popped over for a spot of lunch and spent the rest of the journey playing cards, reading, and enjoying an entire compartment to ourselves... all while traveling at 300 km/h.

And before be knew it we were in Brussels checking in for the Eurostar to London. This is the one leg of the journey that could have gone better; mum was going to visit her sister in Kent, and in hindsight it would have been a lot easier for her to just hop off at Ebbsfleet, but not only had I not checked if the train even stopped at Ebbsflet, she had left a suitcase in my apartment in London which she had to retrieve. In trying to make things easier we added an unforeseen obstacle, but in the end we just had a couple of drinks in St. Pancras while my girlfriend brought us the missing suitcase and my mum doubled back on a southeastern train to Ebbsfleet.

So what made this trip so special? I love traveling by train, and this was an extremely smooth and enjoyable journey, but lat year I took the train all the way to Stockholm which provided a much greater fix for my rail travel desires. Heidelberg is a beautiful town, but again I only visited the one place... The personal connection I have with that place, and experiencing it with my mother helped make it special, but what really made the holiday was the people I met there. Old friends, friends of my mother, people who actually live there. It was a very real experience that it very difficult to get on a holiday....

I'm already planning my next trip back.