Retirement holidays.....

cfw1994

Lifematters said:

Does anyone know if the Eurail pass covers train travel from your home town to a European destination, not just from London. For instance, I would need to take a couple of trains from UK to reach a European destination and not sure if Eurail pass covers this. 

Would love to know if anyone has already planned or done Europe by rail and would be kind enough to share their itinerary  / experience’s.  Looking for inspiration and am grateful to those that have already posted, thank you. Loving this thread! 

No, local trains are generally not covered.
.....although the Man in Seat 61 tells us you can get special rates for Eurostar - about £32 each way for Premier class to Paris.    I'd forgotten about that fantastic train-planning site: that will be somewhere I will be delving into later this year, a lot of planning to do!
& browsing it now, it suggests "Since 2016 you've been allowed to use a global Interrail pass for one journey in your home country to a border, airport or ferry port at the beginning of your trip and one return journey back home at the end."
Plenty of devil in the detail, I am sure!

We went for the 2 month pass as it was 'only' about £80 more (less than 10% more than the 1 month) on the sale deal: if we still have caring visit/duties then, we might chose to use 'cheap' flights to dive back for a week in the middle.  

hugheskevi

cfw1994 said:

.....although the Man in Seat 61 tells us you can get special rates for Eurostar - about £32 each way for Premier class to Paris.    I'd forgotten about that fantastic train-planning site: that will be somewhere I will be delving into later this year, a lot of planning to do!

Man in Seat 61 is good. I've also found Rome2Rio an astonishingly good resource for travel planning. It even came up with boat services on the Amazon from Peru to Manaus that took about a week to get there, with a few changes. It has also been consistently good for Europe too.

roksat

hugheskevi said:

cfw1994 said:

.....although the Man in Seat 61 tells us you can get special rates for Eurostar - about £32 each way for Premier class to Paris.    I'd forgotten about that fantastic train-planning site: that will be somewhere I will be delving into later this year, a lot of planning to do!

Man in Seat 61 is good. I've also found Rome2Rio an astonishingly good resource for travel planning. It even came up with boat services on the Amazon from Peru to Manaus that took about a week to get there, with a few changes. It has also been consistently good for Europe too.

A trip from Peru to Manaus sounds amazing! I always wanted to visit Peru. Of course, it is not cheap, but I can at least set a goal and start putting money aside for it. 
Thanks for this information, I'll check the mentioned sources out for sure. 

hugheskevi

roksat said:

hugheskevi said:

cfw1994 said:

.....although the Man in Seat 61 tells us you can get special rates for Eurostar - about £32 each way for Premier class to Paris.    I'd forgotten about that fantastic train-planning site: that will be somewhere I will be delving into later this year, a lot of planning to do!

Man in Seat 61 is good. I've also found Rome2Rio an astonishingly good resource for travel planning. It even came up with boat services on the Amazon from Peru to Manaus that took about a week to get there, with a few changes. It has also been consistently good for Europe too.

A trip from Peru to Manaus sounds amazing! I always wanted to visit Peru. Of course, it is not cheap, but I can at least set a goal and start putting money aside for it. 
Thanks for this information, I'll check the mentioned sources out for sure. 

It would have been interesting for sure, but sadly my wife vetoed it. Instead, we flew to Iquitos (which is part of the river route between Peru and Manaus) and spent 10 days on a boat, going deep into the Amazon and camping each night.

 Coincidentally, I am in Peru right now. We've been here for a bit over 2 months. It is actually very cheap - the expensive part is flying to and from here from the UK. Longer trips work really well in central and South America, and so are an ideal thing to do early in retirement (or before if possible!). After almost a year of traveling our average daily spend is just over £120 per day. Our rental income from our UK property is a bit over £60 per day. So our time spent travelling will actually be the cheapest part of our retirement!