Eating our Way Through Europe, brought to you by Project Runway: Coca Light and Overnight Trains

I may have mentioned in a previous post that we took four overnight trains throughout the course of our spring break adventure. In Europe, this is the quickest and cheapest way to travel: you don't waste full days on trains going from place to place and it is much less expensive than flying. So we figured, why not? Sure, we might be a little tired, but this way we will be able to see even more throughout the course of our travels. And as you have read in some of my other posts, these overnight trains were not without their adventures and did not always leave us wonderfully well-rested. So how did we beat the tiredness? Well, there wasn't much of a cure for the bags under our eyes, but the way to get re-energized was through caffeine and our drink of choice was Diet Coke (or Coke Zero in my case), which in Europe is known as Coca Cola Light. Except the three of us affectionately dubbed it Coca Light after Kaitlin's slip of the tongue ordering at a restaurant in Prague, when she forgot to add the Cola after Coca. Armed with caffeine, we were ready to tackle Europe!
And as for the trains, I really enjoyed them overall. It's so much easier than flying; you don't have any luggage restrictions and don't need to spend hours going through security. Although that was a bit of a cause for concern in my book, since it seemed like anyone could hop on the train and travel anywhere, since all they checked were tickets. Not once did the conductor ask to see my passport or give me a stamp. Which was disappointing, because we traveled through so many countries that we were hoping to have lots of stamps by the end of the week. But apparently since all our destinations were in the European Union, we only got stamps on the way in and on the way out, back to London. Which was kind of a letdown, but nonetheless, I still loved the trains. I even managed to sleep pretty well on them; it was just the fact that the rides were often only 6 or 7 hours long, which only left us with about 5 hours of sleep, since they wake you up about an hour before you arrive at your destination. And some of our trains were older than others...one Megan accurately called the relic, because the bathroom had foot pedals that we had to use to flush the toilet and get water out of the sink.
After the many air travel fiascoes I have had getting back and forth to South Bend, the ease and simplicity of train travel was great. We easily booked all the trains through the Rail Europe travel guy and everything left on time and arrived on time, making for smooth sailing and little stress on this adventure!