I’ve got two trips for this year bubbling away in the planning stage, and they’re both rail-based.

The second one, scheduled for the summer, is the bigger of the two.  Nicole and I will be travelling Europe by train, overlapping with the southern France leg of Niall’s world wonder hunting and taking in a total of six countries.  Though I have to confess those six include Scotland and England plus only a few hours between trains in Switzerland and Germany, so perhaps I’m inflating the epicness just a tad.

While that is certainly going to be an exciting trip, I’m no less looking forward to the first one, which will be an entirely domestic endeavour.  Much as I love having a job that involves travel, it’s not the truly fun sort of travel.  The time and money for big trips abroad (such as the remaining mullets) have been few and far between lately, and my feet have been increasingly itchy.  No matter, though – in a country as diverse and beautiful as Scotland, there are plenty trips to be chiselled out of my own back yard.

This other trip is in fact inspired by those work-related travels, specifically the countless long and often antisocially timed train journeys to Edinburgh that I take, and I mentioned the idea briefly in this post.  I want to try to scratch the surface of the Inverness to Edinburgh route and see a little of the places that I normally just zip through on the three and a half hour trip with just the occasional half-curious glance out of the window.

I plan to stop at every station along the way for at least two or so hours, a basis which presented quite a logistical puzzle given how rarely one or two stations along the way are served – there is only one train a day from Newtonmore to Dalwhinnie, for instance.  As such, the journey, which I’ll be doing later in the spring, will take me nearly a week.

I aim to write up and publish my account of the trip on this website, as a free download, under the working title “The Next Stop”.

Who knows, I might even write up the summer’s European adventure too.  I’ll keep you posted.