Some time after the bib-and-brace incident it struck me as time to head back to the relative shelter of my favourite place in the whole world. What’s that, you ask? Paris? Bermuda? Some sort of island paradiso?

No. It’s Germany. Land of wurst, lederhosen and excessive compound nouns. (It’s a long story – one I’m sure I’ve time for one of these days.)

But let’s start with the trek there. As a general rule, trains in Germany are exorbitantly expensive, but in the name of true egalitarianism they’ve come up with a special ticket that allows people under the age of 26 to ride the trains on the weekend for a much cheaper price. Called the “schoenes Wochenende” ticket (meaning ‘beautiful weekend’ – how ironic), this effectively means you can ride the regional trains anywhere in the country between Friday and Sunday for a hugely reduced rate.

In practice, though, ‘regional’ train is a synonym for those trains that travel everywhere at a speed of 15kms or less and tend to stop at every possible station along the way. For my sister and I making our way from Berlin to Konstanz, my one-time home away from home, this entailed a fourteen-and-a-half-hour journey with eleven different connections (if you count as our final connection us collapsing into a taxi at midnight when we finally made it back to Konstanz).

For a somewhat public transport-ly challenged traveler like myself, the amount of things that can go wrong on a trip like this are simply countless. Falling asleep and missing your stop, unprecedented platform changes that no-one bothers to warn you about, cancelled trains and those that mysteriously just never show up, dying of the inevitable boredom, throwing yourself onto the tracks when you discover that your turkey baguette has gone soggy, or getting stuck, as we did, in a carriage with Gunther the African prophet who warns of the forthcoming implosion of the earth while flogging second-hand nailcare products.

Tell you what – trips like that can really put you off being a cheapskate.