When two are better than one Back to News

Are you making up for lost time with your travel plans? Are those itchy feet wanting to get out on the trails for as long as possible?

Maybe you’ve considered making the most of your trip with two back-to-back On Foot Holidays. Especially if you’re travelling long distance to Europe, it’s worth taking a longer tour and maximising your time in the gorgeous rural landscapes. And as we’re all thinking carefully about reducing the carbon impact of our travels, it would be ideal to connect two holidays by train rather than plane.

Route Pairings

On many of the route pages on our website you’ll now see suggestions for other holidays with easy rail journeys from one to the other – we’re calling them ‘route pairings’.

We’ve identified the best rail connections and how long they might take, plus some recommended overnight stops where appropriate – details of the best options can all be found here.

And to fire up the imagination, here are just a few examples:

Begin in the Italian lakes, hiking from Lake Maggiore over the mountains to Lake Orta. It then takes about 6 hours to get to Siena by train (via Novara, Milan and Florence) for the start of a ramble through the hills of Southern Tuscany. You could stopover in Florence, ‘Birthplace of the Renaissance’, on the way – your first glimpse of Brunelleschi’s famous dome will never be forgotten!

For those of you holidaying in the UK, most of our routes in the south-west of England can easily be paired. You could begin with bucolic Dorset and its many locations made famous by the novels of Thomas Hardy, before a short bus ride and 4½ hour train journey to St Ives for our Land’s End Circuit in Cornwall. The final section of the journey is glorious – be sure to sit on the right for views of the endless sandy beaches of St Ives Bay.

Explore two fiercely independent and contrasting regions of Spain by starting with a walk in Catalonia through the vineyards of El Priorat – and maybe a wine-tasting. The train connection west to our walk in the Basque Pyrenees is about 6 hours via Barcelona to Pamplona, plus a taxi to your first hotel.  For this route pairing, an overnight stay in Barcelona would give you time to absorb Gaudi’s extraordinary architecture.

At On Foot Holidays we are committed to encouraging the switch from air to rail travel whenever possible. On the ‘Travel info’ tab for all the holidays on our website you’ll find recommended routes from the major rail hubs in Europe (or ferries for the island holidays!), and our bookings team can help you plan your journey.

When you’ve booked any holiday with us, we’ll send you appropriate timetables for train, bus or ferry transfers for the start and end of the route in your Walkers’ Pack.

Look for more Route Pairings here