The Train to Spain - Part One

I don't like to fly. There are various reasons for this, some related to my sheer pig-headedness, I must admit, but fear is fear whatever its root and if there is anything that I can do to avoid travelling by plane, I do it. Luckily I'm no international jet-setting businesswoman and I like to holiday pretty close to home. The presence of my beloved in Spain posed an obvious problem. He was a two and a half hour flight away and I wanted to be with him. He had a rather swish apartment that seemed perfect for two but lonely for one. I considered the obvious solution – the wonder of Xanax, the drug of choice for nervous plane passengers the world over, but it just didn't seem right. There was clearly a more appropriate way of dealing with this. I could feel the fear and fly there anyway, or I could take the train to Spain.

For somebody like me taking the train was clearly the best choice. I've always loved trains; not in a geeky, trainspotting, platform stalking, number noting way. It's just the way I've always got where I wanted to go. When I was growing up I lived with my mum, who didn't drive, so we had to use public transport. As long as I can remember I've been chronically car sick, too, so coaches and buses weren't an option. I'm ashamed to say that this affliction still persists into my thirties and with our wedding venue a forty minute drive away from home along winding country roads I'm hastily trying to get over it. Anyway, trains are how I travel. I feel comfortable on the train. I think getting the Eurostar to Paris is easy, so for me it's logical to add another few hours train journey to that and head for Andalusia.

Just think for a minute about what it means to travel by train. Not the hustle and bustle of the morning commute or the general unpleasantness of short journeys in Britain, squished up against your fellow passengers when you haven't even been properly introduced. Think of travelling long distances and watching the scenery unfold outside your window. There's a sense of surrender that goes hand in hand with train travel. Freed from the stresses of driving, letting someone else take control and allowing yourself to enter your own little world. You can work, you can read, you can plug in your iPod and just watch, letting everything just drift by you. It's true that most of this can be done on a plane too, but in the sky all you can see is clouds. Down on the ground the sides of the tracks are rich with viewing possibilities, a constantly changing landscape of other people's spaces and lives to dip into as you glide past. On a plane you are also assaulted with instructions: when this sign lights up you must put on your seat belt; don't smoke in the toilet; put the oxygen mask on now or you'll die. To my mind this doesn't make for a relaxed trip. On trains there is no safety dance and if anything bad happens you're not thirty thousand feet up in the air, which must surely be a plus.

Looking back through history we can see that there was a time when people travelled by train as a matter of course. When they took the grand tour of Europe, they did it by rail. They didn't whizz around at high speed. The journey mattered as much as the destination. I think that travelling by train is an infinitely civilised experience and something to be savoured. It's also something from our past as humans that it makes sense for us to rediscover now. When we're all concerned about our carbon footprints, surely it doesn't make sense for us to burn several tonnes of jet fuel to get somewhere as quickly as we possibly can. Just because flying is convenient, it doesn't make it right or pleasant. It's a mode of travel that we have at our disposal but we shouldn't always think of it as the first and only solution when we need to get somewhere. I'm a definite proponent of original solutions in all areas of life and I see no reason why that shouldn't apply to getting where I want to go.

An article in the Sunday Times travel section confirmed that it was indeed possible to reach the Southern parts of Spain by rail and it seemed like a sign. God bless the wonderful man who maintains the Seat 61 website and wrote about the wonders of that trip! My future husband and I made the decision that we wanted to be together and that since the plane clearly wasn't going to be an instrument in making this happen, we'd take the alternative route and use the train. Since togetherness was the objective and since I was somewhat nervous about undertaking a European rail odyssey alone, he decided to fly back to Britain and then make the journey to Spain with me. It would be an adventure. A final fling for us before we embarked upon the sensible constraints of married life, or perhaps the start of many happy vacations spent riding the rails. Either way, we were determined to go for it. Our journey would unfold thus: Eurostar from Ashford to Paris, lunch and a happy afternoon spent in the city of light, evening Elipsos sleeper train to Madrid, high speed AVE train from Madrid to Malaga, bus from Malaga to La Linea and taxi from La Linea to the apartment in Santa Margarita. A whole weekend of travelling, but so many sights to see and new things to experience. Overall it would be a journey quite different to just sitting back in an aeroplane seat and waiting to land... or in my case gripping the plane seat in terror and willing the aircraft to land as quickly but as safely as possible. It would be proper travelling.