Next year’s European Football Championships are scheduled for June 7-29. Switzerland and Austria are sharing hosting duties, with matches scheduled in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Geneva. Overseen by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the Championship will have Austria and Switzerland mobbed with soccer-mad Europeans from every corner of the continent.

A few weeks later, from July 7 through 13, the second VIVA World Cup, a competition run with far less fanfare, will take place in the Swedish city of Gällivare. Hosted by the Sápmi Football Association, the football club of the indigenous Arctic Sámi people, the VIVA World Cup allows teams representing nations and subnational groupings without membership in the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) to compete against other subnational groupings. An umbrella organization called the Nouvelle Fédération-Board (or NF-Board) offers a form of legitimization.

Participating teams represent a hodgepodge of entities: microstates, breakaway regions, places with a strong regional identity, and transnational peoples like the Sápmi and the Roma. Among European members of the NF-Board are Chechnya, Wallonia, Occitania, and Monaco.

The VIVA World Cup site doesn’t yet amount to much, so we’re breaking with convention by linking to the Wikipedia NF-Board page, which lists NF-Board members.

Klagenfurt in June and Gällivare in July? Why not?

We slept in a good hour beyond our typical wake-up time. So it’s a sleepy Tuesday. This is just background information. Ignore at will, but know that our morning coffee is especially appreciated today.

The following things have caught our attention over the last few days:

1. Ryanair has announced five new routes in and out of Brussels Charleroi (to Bergerac, Limoges, Perpignan, Porto, and Zaragoza.) No Ryanair expansion these days comes without a cancellation, though there’s only one casuality here: the London Stansted-Charleroi route. Has Eurostar felled Ryanair on the London-Brussels route? It would appear so.

2. On Sunday, the New York Times published travel articles on Kazakhstan and Greenland. If Kazakhstan represents the eastern edge of Europe (with just a piece of its territory west of the Urals) and Greenland represents its western edge (technically a part of the Americas, but tied culturally and politically to Europe), then the NYT pleased us to no end on Sunday. More off-the-beaten-path destinations, please!

3. Those interested in traveling to or from Dublin and Cork over the winter should explore the fab Aer Lingus sale on through midnight Thursday (that is, midnight in Ireland). Good for midweek travel between January 8 and March 12, one-way tickets run just €36, once handling fees are included. Destinations include Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Madrid, Warsaw, and Zurich.

Today, EasyJet announced six new routes, all of which will launch in March and April: Bristol-Biarritz, Bristol-Olbia, Bristol-Split, Edinburgh-Nice, Glasgow-Faro, and London Luton-Pisa.

These six routes complement the dozen the airline will be kicking off over the next several months. Half of these (East Midlands-Barcelona, Bournemouth-Grenoble, Birmingham-Geneva, Bristol-Innsbruck, and London Gatwick-Innsbruck, and Birmingham-Grenoble) are kicking things off in December; other exciting new routes include London Gatwick-Thessaloniki (launching on January 30) and flights to Jersey from Liverpool and London Luton (launching at the close of March.)

These route announcement, taken with the purchase of GB Airways in October, underscore a heightened sense of hubbub over at easyJet. A few weeks ago, easyJet Chief Executive Andy Harrison exhibited O’Leary-esque bravado in his assertion that easyJet will be outperforming Ryanair on profit within the next year.

We’re still anxious to learn what they’re going to do with all those GB Airways Gatwick slots. We’re crossing our fingers that easyJet will take on GB’s routes to Ajaccio, Bastia, Gibraltar, Paphos, and Tunis.

It is always worth pondering quite where is the best place to change trains. Many journeys across Europe offer multiple options. No sane Brit ever chooses to change trains at Birmingham New Street—a sort of subterranean Hades somewhere in the English Midlands—and few are ever really forced to do so. For many rail itineraries across England give a plethora of possible points for an hour’s leisure time, to enjoy a coffee and a bit of fresh air while waiting for the next train connection.

This is the case in many other European countries as well. Surely no rational human being ever decided that Warsaw’s eastern station (Warszawa Wschodnia) was the ideal place to mull over the affairs of the world for an hour or two between trains. Generous-hearted souls we may be, but it is difficult to find a good word for Wschodnia – unless you want to catch the pulse of what life was like in much of eastern and central Europe two decades ago. Take a look at this architectural gem and the surrounding cityscape.

And then there are the railway stations where it is an absolute delight to linger between trains, the sort of places where changing trains is a blessing. Dresden Hauptbahnhof is emerging from a protracted reconstruction to become one of those. Cologne’s Hauptbahnhof already is. Ignore the frenzied bustle of its shopping mall (a tribute to poor taste and greasy food) and head instead for the cathedral, a mere thirty-second walk from the station’s main entrance.

It doesn’t take a lot to transform an enforced layover into a memorable travel moment. Brussels Midi is the largest of the rail stations in the Belgian capital, and the area of town in which it is located is nothing to write home about. But we change trains there often and La Table du Midi, an unpretentious café just a stone’s throw from the railway platforms, makes it all worthwhile.

There are some stations which are just fabulous places to arrive and linger, unquestionably good spots to change trains. Among our favourites are Zürich Hauptbahnhof (so well placed for the city centre) and Berlin’s new Hauptbahnhof (a crystal cathedral for transport.)

So check those schedules carefully. You simply don’t want to change trains at Warszawa Wschodnia or Birmingham New Street.

This is the seventh in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

Jet2holidays is currently marketing a £274 package (per person, based on four people sharing an apartment) departing from Leeds Bradford on May 31. The package includes a round-trip flight on Jet2 (from Leeds Bradford to Olbia), seven nights at the Residence Le Conchiglie in Budoni, transfers to and from the hotel, and taxes. The package gets more expensive later in the spring and summer—£274 for May 31 departure is the cheapest it gets.

Meanwhile, and in a completely unrelated development, Ryanair released its November passenger stats today. Passenger numbers in November were up 23 percent over last November’s numbers, at 3.89 million over last November’s 3.16 million. Load factor lagged slightly, falling to 78 percent from 79 percent. Load factor designates the percentage of seats filled relative to the number of seats offered for sale.

We recently came across a guide to Castle Hotels and Mansions in Austria and bordering countries published by Historic Hotels of Europe. Castle accommodations aren’t usually Cheapo territory, which is why we were overjoyed to find multiple listings for rooms under €100/night, as well as several castles with rooms for far, far less.

The lakeside Seeschlössl Velden in Velden (Carinthia) has rooms that begin at €65, including breakfast. Herberge an der Nikolauszeche in Purbach (Burgenland) sports single rooms that begin at €66, including breakfast. We found another great value at Strasserwirt Herrenansitz zu Tirol in Strassen (East Tyrol), where room rates begin at €48 per night for three-night stays.

The conventional wisdom is that this sort of lavish accommodation is well beyond Cheapo budgets. We’re happy to discover plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Turin, Italy is the latest city to hop on the free/cheap bike-sharing phenomenon sweeping Europe, according to Budget Travel’s “This Just In” blog. Turin is reportedly ready to place 1,300 free bikes on city streets, docking them in 390 stations, in early 2008. Now that’s a great way for Turin’ the town!

As our blog readers know, we’re big fans of the programs and have been monitoring their popularity, especially in Paris, where the Vélib program has been a hit with residents and tourists alike.