BOOKING A TRIP (31 december 2004)
As you may have read in earlier weblogs (click , click), I have been in Eastern Europe a few times.
Since Eastern Europe has charms that appeal to me, I decided to spend a few days in Prague with my sweetheart.
I very like the atmosphere of a train journey, so I wanted to find out how much it would cost me to book a trip by train.
I visited the Internet site. That's easy enough, just click this link. But what then?
I searched for about half an hour trying to find out the various surcharges and what a couchette would cost us, but the site was rather vague about all this.
In the end, I had to confess to my sweetheart that I couldn't figure it out. Maybe she could ...
Well, to make a long story short - my sweetheart couldn't make head or tail of the Dutch Railway pages either.
So we finally decided to try the pages of a tour operator.
Where the Dutch Railways had seemed to make things as difficult as possible, working through these latter pages was a pleasure: just fill in what you want. And in less than ten minutes you know what the trip costs and what the hotel looks like.
In twenty minutes our trip was booked!
I heard that very few people take the train to go to Prague these days. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with the difficulties that the railway companies have laid in the way for those wishing to go by train.
