Travel: Five go off the rails in Europe: 'I missed my stop in West Berlin': The pounds 180 InterRail card is a passport to young adventure, a training for life. Our travellers give us the benefit of their hindsight

I REFUSED to take a rucksack: rucksacks were for wimps. Instead I had two holdalls, a sleeping bag, an enormous white trench coat and a hardback edition of David Copperfield which weighed as much as the coat. If they had sold cleft sticks at Millets I might have bought a few.

I staggered into train compartments looking as if I were carrying the bags and baggage of the entire travelling Manchester United football team. Italian families would recoil with mock horror, eyeing my curious array of possessions with amused delight. Was I moving house? I was on holiday, I told them. Then why did I have a mac - and why such a big mac? Was it a tent?

The truth was I had never intended to go to Italy. I boarded the Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry with the aim of travelling towards the Arctic Circle where I imagined that large white macs might come in handy. Sweden appealed because at the time it was the country of free love, blue movies and, er, free love.

I was 18 and had finished my first year at polytechnic. I was a Virgin Soldier anxious to live a little. At the duty-free shop on the ferry I showed my mettle by investing in a jumbo bottle of Martini Rosso, 200 Disques Bleus and a bottle of aftershave. (The name's Bond, James Bond.)

On the ferry I bumped into an old school chum who was intending to hitchhike down to Italy. Why not meet up, he said. Suddenly the prospect of companionship seemed immensely uplifting: he travels fastest who travels alone but it can be a bit depressing.

He reckoned that it would take him three days to get to Verona, so we arranged to meet outside the station at 9.30am. Such arrangements seemed impossibly grown-up and worldly wise.

I had three days to kill. From the Hook of Holland I boarded a train to Copenhagen and shared my Martini Rosso with a French girl and two drunken sailors from Hamburg and made a start on David Copperfield.

I walked from Copenhagen station straight into Sin City: I was as shocked as Lord Longford and the Festival of Light committee. When I was solicited by a prostitute I ran straight back to the station, caught the night train to Munich and fell into the comfortable arms of Peggotty('Barkis is willin' ').

Munich was about to open the 1972 Olympics, and soon to suffer the nightmare of the attack by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But for the moment it was all bright Bavarian good cheer. I travelled around on the public transport system without a ticket and felt like a proper anarchist.

Incredibly, my friend was waiting at Verona station. We travelled down to the Ligurian coast and proved embarrassingly inept at chatting up girls of all nationalities - even a couple of gorgeous free-loving Swedes who stung us for a night of expensive cocktails.

We moved on to the South of France: me by InterRail, he by thumb. But our luck gave out: I hung around Toulon station for hours surrounded by my baggage before giving up on him.

For some days I travelled restlessly: I hardly stirred from the stations - the trains had a womb-like comfort which was difficult to leave. I popped across the border to Spain, back to Paris, on to Amsterdam before making for Berlin.

At Berlin I overshot my station. Instead of getting off in West Berlin, I found myself crossing the Berlin Wall. I stepped off the train into an East Berlin scene of watchtowers and rottweilered guards straight from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Terrified, I bundled my Everest of baggage towards another platform and caught a train heading in the direction from which I had just come. I dreamily returned to the company of Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep as I hastened home to Wales.

I had left home a boy, I would like to say I came back a man: in fact I returned an exhausted boy. I threw my mac straight in the bin. However, the InterRailer's motto (Ne Pas Se Pencher) stayed with me and has served me well ever since: it is dangerous to lean out of the window.

(Photograph omitted)