My favourite on-the-road Christmas happened in Barcelona a few years ago. It was during the two months of sleeping on buses and spending the waking hours wandering the grand cities of Europe (the so-called ‘Tour de Eurolines’), so I knew that there wasn’t much happening over a vast geographical distance in the way of an urban White Christmas. I instead hightailed it in the opposite direction, and went towards Spain.

First stop – Andorra. If the snow wasn’t going to come to me, I’d go to the snow and get in a day of skiing before spending Christmas in Barcelona. In the Andorran capital of Andorra la Vella, I met a Brazilian traveller. We got talking and I foolhardily offered to help him learn to ski the next day. It was a big call, but I thought it was possible. But clad in jeans and yearning for crystal blue oceans in which to scuba dive, he looked sorely depressed on the slopes. With the pained expression of a wet cat, he retreated to the safe confines of the bar and left me alone for the rest of the afternoon.

By the time we got back to the town to catch the bus to Barcelona together, he was thoroughly annoying me. Whilst he was some sort of navigator by profession, he couldn’t even find his way in the single duty-free-lined shopping street of Andorra la Vella. When I confronted him about his total inability to discern left from right, he sheepishly conceded that he was usually dependent on GPS. Plus there was the whole issue of “lost in translation.” He insisted on “being the man” and doing the talking, but as he was translating his question posed in Spanish, into Portuguese in his head (you could almost see the internal cogs turning through his facial expression), and then into English for my benefit, it became quite an unwieldy process during which time I just asked the question in English and had a much quicker and comprehensible reply (and anyway – the official language of Andorra is Catalan!)

By the time we got to Barcelona, I was eager to ditch him, and still buzzing from skiing adrenaline, I found an American girl who, I’m sorry to say, got quite an ear-bashing and we were up for half the night in the hostel talking about our travels. She was leaving the hostel the next day though, to cat-sit for a British woman who was going home for the holidays. We nonetheless agreed to meet for a drink the following evening – during which I actually met the British woman who also invited me to stay in her apartment over the holiday period.

Score! But what random backpacker luck! The Christmas we spent together was marvellous – we did the decorations and Christmas dinner and everything.

It even snowed when we went together to the mountain-top monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat, so I managed to have my White Christmas in Spain after all!

I must explain why Eurolines was my key to surviving my first year in Europe, although really it’s very simple.  Accomodation.  I thanked my lucky stars the day I found that Eurolines had a two month unlimited travel pass, night buses, and a low-season discount.  What seemed perfectly appealing did have its drawbacks though.  The accommodation was a bus seat (although being able to sleep quite compactly, I could crawl up in foetal position and get a good night’s sleep if I had both seats to myself), and “low-season” meant “middle of winter”, so it was quite chilly for the numerous 4 and 5am arrivals.  But what I would do is spend 5 nights in the bus, waking and wandering the cities to which I had been spirited overnight, and then a few nights in a hostel for a shower and a proper bed.  I loved it.  If I couldn’t get a ticket to somewhere, I’d just go elsewhere.  I think my itinerary read something like: Budapest – Amsterdam – Dublin (as there weren’t any tickets to Stockholm when I first wanted to go, I spent the weekend in Ireland instead) – Amsterdam – Stockholm – Copenhagen – Paris – Madrid (rest, relax… shower…) – Andorra (a day of skiing in the

Pyrenees, why not?) – Barcelona (more time…) – Frankfurt – Warsaw – Krakow (even more time…) –

Prague.

  I’ve overcome my initial attention-span deficit and I am now able to stay in a place for longer than three weeks without getting itchy feet.  Maybe I can stretch it to four weeks now… 

But no, I was recently able to stay in the one place for a year and a half – however, as it was Russia, the biggest country in the world, I could quite contently “trot” at my own pace for vast distances and through diverse cultural and geographic regions without having to deal with the bureaucratic visa rigmarole of leaving Russia’s borders.  But more about that later…