Make your mistakes early—it gives you more time to make amends for them. It’s a good rule to live by, but it doesn’t always work when travelling, when one mistake can cause a domino run of missed connections and extra expenses. Well, I made my mistake on day one (or two, depending on how you count it) but although the dominoes teetered, they haven’t toppled—yet.

That mistake? Getting into the station at Köln/Cologne after enjoying a beer on the banks of the Rhine, only to find that where a train for Copenhagen should have been was a train for Warsaw instead. Had I looked around more thoroughly, I would have spotted that two of its carriages were bound for Copenhagen, after being decoupled in Hannover, but instead I started asking questions of station attendants who were even more confused than I was, and soon my sleeping berth was heading north without me.

Cue some anxious waiting, dawning realisation, confusing and irritating conversations with staff and eventual resolution in the form of the next train, which was at 2.10am, requiring around four hours of sitting on platform 5a of Köln Hauptbanhof. This change in plan doesn’t seem to have cost me any extra, and I’ll get into Copenhagen just in time to catch my onward connection to Stockholm, albeit without the two hours for lunch and good night’s sleep I’d originally hoped for.

So, first crisis averted. Probably. As I write this, I’m on a train somewhere north of Lübeck (passing Neustadt, if the sign I’ve just seen can be believed) moving at a leisurely pace through waterways and forests, mist-enshrouded and still in the early morning. I’ll probably be in Stockholm when I get to post it—another new city and new nation, and the final staging point before the Russian segment of this adventure.