Traveling is the ruin of all happiness!

The title is taken from a quote by Fanny Burney who was actually talking about how dull other buildings are once you have seen what Italy has to offer. The part I've selected seems to sum up my regular commute, especially just lately when the German rail network hasn't been living up to it's fearsome reputation for punctuality.



But I digress.

I am back on the trains after a year - and this time it's not because my car is behaving like a very expensive, and very large, paperweight. No, last year I had a bit of a - compulsory - test run of trains between where I live in Erkelenz and Ratingen, where I work. My office moved there in 2011 from Willich and doubled my commuting distance. That meant 140 kilometers added to my mileage per day with all the kerfuffle and expense that entails. So my new journey to work now looks like this:

Home - Erkelenz Station: car (currently a black Golf Plus)
Erkelenz Station - Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof (main station): train (the RE4)
Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof - Düsseldorf airport station: train (there are several different ones that I can take according to my arrival time at Düsseldorf Hbf)
Düsseldorf airport station - office: Bus (the route 759)

Luckily for me, in the morning there are four trains an hour heading towards Düsseldorf - although one of them involves a change at Mönchengladbach so I don't want to take that one unless I have to. My train of choice is the 6:31 - partly because it terminates in Düsseldorf so I'm not in any danger of sleeping past my stop.

After that I can get the 7:22 from platform 17 to the airport, and the 759 bus to my office. The buses run every 10 minutes so if it is full I just wait for the next one. It's only about 7 stops and a 2 minute walk to my office and the first coffee of the day.

The downside of this journey is that I've already uploaded the photos of the seat covers already. Except for the ones from the 759 bus, because usually it's too full.

The upside is that some lovely people - well, they might not be lovely, I wouldn't know because i've never met them - have supplied me with pictures of seat covers from their journeys. So. Since I have boring, already seen seat covers on my journey, here are two from Southern Trains in the UK.

And there we have it. One of the things that Fanny Burney hadn't anticipated: that second photograph demonstrates exactly why travelling ruins happiness. I can't imagine my state of mind if I had to sit on that every morning. Look at those colours! It's like a refugee from the 1970s!

Hopefully I'll find something interesting to blog about soon.