Travel and Holidays

I'd like to talk about an overnight train journey I made a couple of years ago, from the capital down to a small town on the coast where my grandmother lives. It's a trip of around twelve hours, and I made it with my younger brother just after I'd finished my exams. We travelled in a sleeper carriage, which neither of us had done before. We'd booked the cheapest berths, right at the end of the carriage, and to be honest I wasn't expecting to enjoy it much — I just saw it as a way of getting there. But almost as soon as we left the station, the trip turned into something else. We shared the compartment with an elderly couple who insisted on splitting their dinner with us, and we ended up talking with them until almost midnight about all the places they'd lived. The part I remember most clearly came at dawn. I woke up around five, climbed down from my bunk, and stood in the corridor as the train wound along a river valley with mist hanging over the water. Everyone else was asleep, and for about an hour it felt like I had that whole landscape to myself. I think the journey has stayed with me because it was the first proper trip my brother and I made without our parents, so it felt like a small rite of passage. And it changed how I think about travel in general — it taught me that getting there can matter as much as the destination, which is why I still pick trains over planes whenever I can.