Purely European case - during height of Covid frenzy at end of 2021, I spent 2 weeks paragliding in south of Spain around Malaga. When departure time came, home

Purely European case - during height of Covid frenzy at end of 2021, I spent 2 weeks paragliding in south of Spain around Malaga. When departure time came, home country (Switzerland) changed covid rules into PCR-before-boarding, which was impossible to obtain where I was. So I took train since land borders were much more permissive. Instead of 1.5h flight + a bit of time extra around, it took me full 2 days with extra sleep in Barcelona of fastest bullet trains Europe has (TGV + Spanish equivalent, 300kmh was frequent speed) to get home. That's not even through-Europe crossing, rather a relatively small hop within south-western part of Europe. It was more expensive as flights too (but not that much, but then there was hotel). Any destination we went through for holidays in past few years are completely unreachable by trains, and the amount of hops (stress, delays, missed connections) is massive. Train networks have much more massive cascade issues with delays propagating like tsunami far and wide. Trains simply don't cover much apart from few very narrow cases in best possible situation globally. Everywhere else, train networks are much worse.