Rhine – Kathleen Jowitt

spread from a week to view diary with tickets from various German transportation services and attractions stuck in

You get to see the journal. I spilt hot chocolate in my handbag a month or so back and it went all over my Filofax. Anyway, this is far more interesting.

I started keeping an agenda journal in 2017 after seeing the technique on The Soul of Hope, and it’s the only form of diary I’ve managed to keep up with any kind of regularity. I don’t make an entry every day, but to date I have been able to make an entry for every day. It serves as a repository for all the silly bits of paper that are too pretty to throw away and too silly to keep around, it serves as a record of what I’ve been up to and tells me when I last emptied the compost bin, and it’s fun. I’ve never yet got more than a week behind, and if I do find that I just can’t remember a day (or if it was just too boring to record in detail) I fill the gap with stickers.

This spread comes from the week we travelled down the Rhine – a most excellent trip, and one I’m glad to remember. This year’s journal is rather fatter than last year’s, although not so much so as I originally thought before I compared them.

map showing most of western Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with major rail routes

I’ve been trying to take a trip down the Rhine ever since 2018 – when I got very close, but was thwarted by train delays. In 2019 we were saving to buy a house, and also just weren’t very efficient. 2020 – well, no. I was quite sufficiently twitchy about going to the Isle of Wight: crossing any international borders would have been too much.

And I have to admit that things aren’t looking great for 2021, either. (Plan B for next year is to hire a car and see how many of the Great Little Trains of Wales we can get around.)

Still, we’ve put together a convincing itinerary; we just need to find a convincing week-and-a-bit to slot it into. Maybe that’ll be next year. Maybe it’ll be some other time. Anyway, the Rhine is staying on my wishlist until I actually manage it.