thrill

Toasted ham baguettes in hand, we cheered as the new-generation Nightjet drew into Vienna Hauptbahnhof. It was a little before 7pm, and as the carriages hummed past I felt a rush of joy, like celebrity trainspotter Francis Bourgeois, but without the GoPro on my forehead. For more than three years I’ve been documenting the renaissance of sleeper trains, and I’d wondered if I might one day tire of them. But the thrill seems only to intensify each time I embark on another nocturnal adventure, this time with my two daughters – aged eight and five – who were already arguing over the top berth. The first four carriages were designated for travellers to the Italian port city of La Spezia, the other seven carrying on to Roma Tiburtina, where we would alight at 10am. Once in Rome we had 24 hours to eat classic carbonara, dark chocolate gelato, and bike around the Villa Borghese before taking a train to Florence.

Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) has played the lead role in resuscitating Europe’s night trains. Towards the end of 2016, ÖBB launched its Nightjet network on 14 routes, using old rolling stock it bought from Deutsche Bahn. Then, to the delight of train nerds like me, it launched a brand-new fleet at the end of 2023, and now operates 20 routes across Europe. We were now on board this high-spec service, which smelled of freshly unpacked furniture, the carpets soft underfoot, the lighting adjustable to disco hues of neon blue and punk pink.

We were booked into a couchette carriage, which mostly comprisesd mini cabins designed for solo travellers preferring privacy. Placing shoes and small bags in lockers, passengers can open a metal door with a keycard and crawl into their single berth, drawing the door closed around them, and not have to look at another human until morning. Last year I had trialled the mini cabins from Vienna to Hamburg alongside a tall friend who had likened the experience to sleeping inside a bread bin, though I hadn’t found it as claustrophobic as I’d feared, just a bit hard, chilly, and with a pillow as flat as a postage stamp. So I was curious to see how the carriage’s four-person private compartments, for families and groups, would differ.

Normally happy to share with strangers, I’d booked a whole compartment for the three of us: more to protect other hapless travellers from my children, who were now swinging off the berths like members of Cirque du Soleil, their sweaty socks strewn under the seats. With raised sides, the upper berths were safe for the girls to sleep in without rolling out, and I set about tucking in their sheets while they settled down to finish their baguettes. There is no dining car on the Nightjet, so we’d bought food from the station, which was now moving backwards as the train sailed out of the Austrian capital in silence, smoothly curving south-west.

Two days earlier we’d arrived in Vienna by train from London, via Paris, and had checked into the Superbude Wien Prater, a curious hotel that appeared part art-installation, part hostel, with gen Zs slouched around worn leather sofas on MacBooks. With four-bed family cabins overlooking the Prater amusement park, it was a great location from which to explore the city, then finish the evening with a terrifying rollercoaster and a spicy Bitzinger wurst. A friend had described Vienna to me as a grand and beautiful “retirement village”, but, on the contrary, its green spaces, playgrounds and museums made it an easy stop for 48 hours with kids.

Hopping off the Nightjet from Paris, we’d gone straight to my favourite restaurant, Edelgreisslerei Opocensky – an unassuming nook serving homely dishes such as stuffed gnocchi, and goulash with dumplings – before whiling away an afternoon at the Children’s Museum at Schönbrunn Palace.

Dressing up like young Habsburgs, the girls had swanned around in wigs and musty gowns, laying tables for banquets and begging not to leave – a far cry from our usual museum experiences. Before boarding this train we’d had one last run around the interactive Technical Museum, where the human-sized hamster wheels, peg games and slides had so worn out the children that my five-year-old was asleep as the train plunged into the Semmering mountain pass.

It was still light as we swept around the Alps, my eight-year-old kneeling at the window and asking where local people shopped, so few and far between were signs of human life. Horses grazed in paddocks, cows nuzzled, and the occasional hamlet emerged from round a bend as though the chalets were shaken like dice and tossed into the slopes. In the blue-grey twilight we watched streams gleam like strips of metal, and spotted a single stag poised at the edge of a wood, before the train made a long stop at the Styrian city of Leoben, at which point we turned in.

Like the mini cabins, the compartment was still too cold, the pillow still too flat, but the berths were wider and the huge window a blessing compared with the single berths’ portholes – this one allowed for wistful gazing.

Shoving a rolled-up jumper under my head, I fell asleep, waking at 7am to rumpled clouds and a golden flare on the horizon. Most night trains terminate soon after passengers have woken up, but this one was perfect, allowing us to enjoy a leisurely breakfast of hot chocolate and jam rolls while watching the Tuscan dawn breaking into song, and Umbrian lakes and cornfields running parallel before we finally drew into Rome – on time.

When travelling alone I relish arriving with the entire day at my disposal, but with children it’s hard work waiting until 3pm to check in to accommodation, so I default to staying at a Hoxton hotel if one is available. Its Flexy Time policy allows guests to choose what time they check in and out for free, and by 11am we had checked in, showered and set off to toss coins in the Trevi fountain, finding thick whorls of eggy carbonara at nearby trattoria Maccheroni, and gelato at Don Nino. To avoid the crowds and heat, we waited until 6pm to hire an electric pedal car from Bici Pincio at the Villa Borghese and drove around the landscaped, leafy grounds, relishing the quietness of the evening ride. Excited about the next adventure in Florence, the girls had only one complaint: that they couldn’t ride there on the night train.

Monisha Rajesh is the author of Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train (Bloomsbury, £22), published on 28 August and available on pre-order at guardianbookshop.com

Omio provided travel in a four-person private compartment in a couchette carriage from Vienna to Rome (from £357). Accommodation was provided by Superbude Wien Prater in Vienna (doubles from €89 room-only); and The Hoxton in Rome (doubles from €189 room-only)

In a stadium that has in its day danced to the tune of many different teams from many different sports – the Kangaroos and the Jillaroos, the Reds and the Roar, the Matildas, the Broncos and the Dolphins – it’s the Lions that will fill the place on Wednesday in Brisbane.

Formerly the site of a burial ground and then Lang Park sports stadium, named after a particularly fiery Presbyterian minister from Greenock in Renfrewshire, the Suncorp stands on some interesting terrain in the inner city.

When people say there’s an elephant in the room in this place they’re literally talking about an elephant. Carley, a circus animal, was a beloved performer on this land in the 1950s, so much so that they buried her here after the poor thing performed her last trick for the entertainment of the masses.

The Queensland Reds – coached by Les Kiss who for six years was an assistant with Ireland and for another three was the director of rugby with Ulster – will be looking to do a different kind of burial.

Much of the preamble to the Lions’ second game on Australian soil has, unsurprisingly, centred around the half-back partnership of Scotland’s Finn Russell and Ireland’s Jamison Gibson-Park, two players that serve as a constant reminder that rugby, though a playground for big beasts, can still be artistic and beautiful.

Their combination is one that will have people shifting forward in their seats with quickening pulses. Rugby is forever in danger of eating itself with its inexorable march towards grunt and aggression, but these two remind you of why you might have fallen in love with rugby in the first place.

Not many have ever had their rugby heart stolen by a one-dimensional big banger. But Russell and Gibson-Park and their potential to thrill? That’s different.

They’ve never played together, but Wednesday is the night it happens and if it’s all right then we’re going to be seeing a whole lot more of it in the Saturdays to come.

They’re very different people – Russell gregarious and charismatic, Gibson-Park quiet and laidback – but they’re one and the same when it comes to how the game should be played: fast and furious, off the cuff and adventurous.

Scrum-halves are supposed to be loud and bossy, but Gibson-Park isn’t either of those things. His Lions and Ireland coach Andy Farrell calls him horizontal, such is his unflappable personality.

His speed of thought is electrifying, his accuracy when firing passes that are so on the money that they can eliminate two and three defenders in an instant is unerring.

His quick taps bamboozle defences, his support lines mess with their heads, his ability to scan a field and know in an instant where the space is is a large part of the reason why Ireland have been so consistent over so many years. He’s a totem of that team – tiny but towering at the same time.

It’s said that there is only one Antoine Dupont, but that’s not really true. There’s one and three-quarters and the three-quarters is Gibson-Park. At his best, he’s very much in the same conversation as the great Frenchman.

And now we get to see him play with Russell, the great conductor at 10, a figure of growing authority on the back of a confidence-boosting and trophy-laden season with Bath.

The double threat is what Lions’ fans have wanted to see. Normally a coach wouldn’t necessarily play his first-choice 10 on Saturday and Wednesday, but Farrell is making an exception in Brisbane because he, as much as anybody else, is mustard keen to see how these two will gel. Why wait? Just crack on.

They’ve had a few training sessions but no game time together. Will the lack of familiarity get in the way or will it be chemistry from minute one? Intriguing.

The first time Gene Kozicki drove to Lompoc to see a rocket blast off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, it was night, and the whole scene reminded him of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The road was blocked off. There were police. Flashing lights. A guy standing near Kozicki had a radio scanner, and they listened as a spartan voice counted down: Ten, nine, eight, seven … Over the hill, where the rocket was on the pad, all was dark.

And then it wasn’t.

“The sky lights up, and it’s like daytime,” Kozicki said. “This rocket comes up and then a few seconds later, the sound hits you. It’s just this roar and rumble, and then it’s a crackle. And then you look at it and you realize, this thing is not a movie. This thing is actually going into space.”

People (and dogs) gather in Lompoc to watch SpaceX successfully launch a Falcon 9 rocket. (George Rose / Getty Images)

Kozicki told me about that experience as we both stood atop a sand dune at Surf Beach, just outside Lompoc, waiting for a different rocket to launch. Through my binoculars I could see a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 on the pad at Vandenberg, with a Starlink satellite on top. SpaceX and other companies have been sending up more and more rockets in recent years, and Lompoc has become a day trip destination for aerospace aficionados.

With Blue Origin sending up an all-female crew, including Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, from West Texas in April and my social feeds full of pics of launches from California’s Central Coast — not to mention SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s preternatural ability to stay in the news — it seemed like everyone was talking about rockets, so I wanted to get as close to a liftoff as possible.

I had driven to Surf Beach on the advice of Bradley Wilkinson, who runs the Facebook group Vandenberg Rocket Launches. When asked for the best spot to experience a launch, Wilkinson had responded, in the manner typical of connoisseurs, with questions of his own.

“Do you want to see it?” Wilkinson asked me. “Do you want to feel it? Do you want to hear it?”

If I had just wanted to see it, he said, I could do that easily from Los Angeles. If I picked a launch around twilight, I could even see the jellyfish effect that happens when sunlight reflects off the rocket plume. (People all across Southern California had that experience earlier this week.) But I wanted more. I wanted to hear and feel the launch, so I took off toward Vandenburg on a clear Friday afternoon, staying just ahead of traffic.

Rocket launches have become more frequent at Vandenberg Space Force Base, located in Santa Barbara County.

(Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Not everyone is a fan of the increased frequency of SpaceX launches. Beyond the many controversies surrounding the company’s founder, there are concerns about the effects of sonic booms on the environment, and the California Coastal Commission has been battling SpaceX in court over the need for permits. Some Lompoc residents have complained about the effects of all that rumbling on their houses, but others, like Wilkinson, enjoy living so close to the action; he said he doesn’t even bother straightening the pictures on the walls of his house anymore.

As I drove up the coast, I kept checking the Facebook group for updates. Launches can be scrubbed for any number of reasons, and Wilkinson and other members of the group, including Kozicki, have become adept at reading signs: They track the weather; they watch the rocket’s movement toward the pad; they monitor SpaceX’s website and social media.

I pulled into the Surf Beach parking lot about an hour before launch, and that’s where I met Kozicki, chatting with a SpaceX engineer and her mother. The engineer was off the clock, but that didn’t stop her mom from telling everyone, proudly, that her daughter worked at SpaceX. It became a refrain for the next hour:

“You should ask my daughter. She works at SpaceX.”

“Stop telling everyone I work at SpaceX!”

From the top of the dunes, the four of us watched the launchpad for telltale signs of exhaust. I thought of how, thousands of miles away, crowds in St. Peter’s Square had watched for white smoke with a similar feeling of anticipation. Other spectators soon crunched across the ice plants and joined us on our perch. Some of them had parked in a bigger lot to the north and followed the train tracks that ran parallel to the beach.

The SpaceX engineer answered questions about rocket stages and landing burns. She was not authorized to speak to the media, but she shared her knowledge with everyone her mom sent her way.

We all watched and waited. More people walked up the dunes, including Dan Tauber, who said he’d been motorcycling around the area with friends before deciding to break off from the group to experience the launch.

“You want to feel your bones rattle,” he said. “So why not get as close as you can?”

Kozicki announced to the group that we’d know the launch was about to happen — really about to happen — when we saw a deluge of water on the pad. Then it would be a matter of seconds before liftoff.

Tauber and I sat together in the sand. We watched and waited. He had been a firefighter in San Francisco. He now lived in San Diego. We watched. We waited. A southbound Pacific Surfliner train pulled up alongside the parking lot. The railroad bell kept ringing, adding to the tension.

“Deluge!” shouted Kozicki.

“Deluge!” shouted the SpaceX engineer’s mother.

Three seconds later, ignition. Fire. Smoke. Liftoff.

Cameras clicked.

Someone shouted, “Whoa!”

I might’ve done the same.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off. Vandenberg Space Force Base has hosted 836 rocket launches to date.

(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

The sound of the rocket came next, just as Kozicki had described. Roar. Rumble. Crackle.

Tauber leaned back and said, “I’m just going to enjoy it. Take pictures for me.”

The rocket rose in the blue sky. I managed to get a few pics, but the flames were so bright that my camera’s settings went haywire. I put the camera down and watched the rocket go up, up, up. Then it was gone. Awestruck, I stood around, wanting more. I wasn’t sure where to go afterwards.

I knew I would be back.

Tips for experiencing a Vandenberg rocket launch

Find an upcoming launch

Start with a site like SpaceLaunchSchedule.com. There are many reasons why a launch could get scrubbed, however, so Wilkinson suggests checking the Vandenberg Rocket Launches group about 12 hours before a liftoff is scheduled to see whether it’s actually going to happen. The final authority for SpaceX launches would be SpaceX.com.

If you just want to see the rocket, go outside when there’s a liftoff scheduled for twilight or later. Depending on the weather, you should be able to see the rocket streaking across the Los Angeles sky.

For a closer look, head toward Lompoc

Surf Beach is a good spot, although the parking lot can fill up quickly. There is another parking lot to the north, at Ocean Park, about a 30-minute walk from Surf Beach. Wilkinson also recommended just parking along Ocean Avenue to feel the launch in your feet.

“There’s more of a rumble out there,” he said. “You can feel the vibration in the ground.” Other viewing spots, recommended by Explore Lompoc, include Santa Lucia Canyon Road & Victory Road; Harris Grade Road; and Marshallia Ranch Road. No matter where you park, be considerate of locals. That means no littering, and no middle-of-the-night tailgating. The roads can be crowded with cars and people, so take care whether driving or walking.

While in Lompoc

If you’re looking for food after the launch, I had a satisfying surf and turf burrito from Mariscos El Palmar (722 E. Ocean Ave) in Lompoc, right next to a bar called Pour Decisions.

There’s a renowned burger at Jalama Beach Store, where you can also view a launch. Jalama Beach County Park has many charms, but the cellular signal is spotty out there, so you’ll likely have no way of knowing whether a launch has been scrubbed at the last minute. But you’ll have a pretty drive either way.

Looking to spend the night? The Village Inn (3955 Apollo Way) just opened and markets itself as being inspired by “the golden age of space exploration.” If you’re having a space day, might as well go all the way.

CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet four-and-a-half miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival.

One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.

The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.

This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.

In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.

The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.

But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens be the day the “Mission: Impossible” franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next 2 hours and 49 minutes.

The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie (who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen) but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.

Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’s weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”

That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There’s flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.

Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet-points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.

But Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue attempts to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.

The flight chase is fantastic. It’s what Isaac Newton might have made if he’d demonstrated velocity by placing an apple in a bucket and whipping it in circles. But even its exhilaration gets bested by a centerpiece underwater sequence in which Cruise scuba dives alone in silence suffering stunts that you cannot believe. I couldn’t tell you how long he swam — at some point, my heart stopped — but there are images of vertical sheets of water and the star in shivering, fetal isolation that felt like the franchise wasn’t just trying to top itself, but hoping to best “Titanic” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

As the sound design rumbled with queasy creaks over shots of a submarine teetering on the edge of a deep-sea cliff, I found myself thinking most of all of that famous sequence of a frozen shack sliding off a cliff in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 “The Gold Rush,” which celebrates its centennial anniversary this fall. By coincidence or grand design, a gorgeously restored “The Gold Rush” was also the first movie screened at this year’s Cannes. If there’s a Cannes in 2125, maybe it’ll play a 100-year-old Tom Cruise classic. It won’t be this “Mission: Impossible” over the first, third or fourth. Regardless, I bet the fans will still be cheering.