Today I once again traveled from the city where I live, Aarhus (Denmark), to my hometown, Badajoz (Spain), to visit my loved ones and enjoy some time at home.

Despite the long hours of the trip, I usually enjoy most of it and the 14-17 hours I spend leave a lot of room for reflexions and facing my own thoughts.

On the last hours of the trip, while I was crossing the usual mediterranean forests of Spain, I realized how lucky I am. Although it is a long trip, the mere fact that I can combine on a sigle day at least four different types of public transport, go through four countries and manage to travel more than 2700km makes me realise how well coordinated our society (the european) is.

The overview of the journey is as follows:

1. Woke up at 5:00 AM, had some breakfast and headed to my nearest bus stop to catch the 5:20 bus that dropped me at the Aarhus train station.
2. Hopped in a train at 6:00(god, I love danish trains) and arrived to Copenhagen’s airport at 9:35.
3. Right on time to catch my 11:05 flight to Madrid, a flight that arrived at the promised time of 14:35.
4. Then I took the regional train to Madrid train station and grabbed some lunch on the go. Here is a picture of the beautiful architecture at this station.
5. The train to Badajoz left at 16:38 and is expected to arrive at 21:00.

Now, the beauty of it is that, not only every single mean of transport arrived on time, but also the infrastructure that surrounds each of them. For example, when I left Aarhus at a very early hour, the coffe shop of the station was already up a running so the average commuter can grab a coffe and start working from the comfort of the train. Or the fact that anytime I needed to use the bathroom there was one at a less than a minute walk (and very clean btw). Or the variety of lunch options I had just at a 10 min walk from Madrid Atocha train station. You get the point.

This make the travel so much easier and uneventful. I spent most of my time of the time working, reading or looking through the window, activities that I would have done anyway or that I enjoy. I don’t feel I have wasted my time today, as it is the case when I have to drive or share a car. Those time I can spend from 2 to 4 hours just sitting and looking at a line of asphalt, hopefully with music.

In the end there is always room for improvement, specially regarding the public transport network in Spain of medium size cities as mine. But I think we, as a society, should be proud of what we accomplished so far.