16 days across Europe by train: our family’s epic Interrail adventure
When I wrote 11 tips for holidaying by train 6 months ago, a few people asked me if I would do an updated version following our summer holiday. We got back from an amazing whirlwind 16 days of travel last week, so here is my 2025 version. Yes, it is an excuse to write what I did on my holidays.
We bought a 7 day interrail pass. With hindsight, I should have bought a 10 day one but I bought the pass before I’d planned the trip, and somewhere in the planning, I forgot I only had 7 days of travel covered.
My original plan had been to go to Zurich, then Venice. But getting on the scenic railway looked like it involved a tricky train change for a service that only ran twice a day and I wasn’t sure my children would appreciate the journey as much as we would. I also got the romantic idea of taking my children up the Jungfraujoch, which my parents took me to when I was 8-years-old.
I switched our destination to Bern, then thought it would be less travel if we had a night on the mountain instead of several more hours on the train to go back to Bern. We’d intended to take a day trip to Lake Geneva and that turned into another overnight stay. By accident, we ended up with more destinations than travel days.
That meant we had to pay for some journeys. We also found prices jumped the closer to the travel day, which isn’t surprising but it’s a lesson learned to lock things in once you’ve made a decision.
That said, not fixing all our travel meant we were able to have an amazing experience we would have missed if we had done it 24 hours later, as planned.
As I berated myself for not booking train tickets, we checked the weather forecast and found there was a storm coming in which would mean the Jungfrau would be completely covered by cloud.
Instead of checking out at 11am next morning and taking a leisurely trip to Lauterbrunnen, where we had booked a hotel, we decided to check out at 6am and head for Jungfraujoch.
It was well worth the early start. The views on the way up the mountain were wonderful and at the top, we stepped out of the station to find clear blue skies and perfect white snow.
Jungfraujoch was one of the highlights of the holiday. We spent at least half an hour out on the glacier. My sons threw snowballs, built up a mound of snow, and did snow angels. It was pricey (the journey isn’t covered by the interrail pass, but it does give you a discount) but the glorious weather meant for us it was well worth the experience.
You change trains both ways at Kleine Scheidegg and on our way back down we took time out to enjoy a giant slab of apple cake (the boys had ice cream) and coffee while taking in the mountain view. Then we got off at Lauterbrunnen and picked up our bags from the storage locker we put them in at the station when we changed trains in the morning before heading up to our hotel for the night.
We had a lovely family room with a great view, not far from a waterfall. You can walk up steps that lead under the waterfall, which my children really enjoyed. Then we headed back to the hotel which had a restaurant for dinner and I got to try raclette, which was really tasty.
Our concerns that our children would get fed up with long train journeys or not be interested in the views were unfounded. So finding ourselves with a rainy day, we decided to take the scenic GoldenPass Express which travels from Interlaken to Montreux, on Lake Geneva.
But before we did that, we had a couple of hours in Lauterbrunnen. We had hoped to go to the Trümmelbach Falls but we just missed the bus and didn’t have time to do it justice before our train. So instead, we took a cable car up the mountain, and then a short train ride to Mürren. After a walk through the village, we arrived at the cable car at the other end, which is the steepest in the world and takes you down to Stechelberg, where we admired another waterfall before getting on the bus back to our luggage locker.
We would happily have stayed longer in Lauterbrunnen. I could have saved us a travel day, and gone to the Trümmelbach Falls, before taking the train directly down to Brig for our connection to Milan if we’d stayed a second night.
The Goldenpass Express was enjoyable but the rain was so heavy we didn’t get much of a view, and it was pouring with rain when we got to Montreux. We took a very wet walk to see the statue of Freddie Mercury and could see that it would be a lovely place to visit in good weather. We now have two future holiday ideas: one to Lake Geneva and the other to the Alps so we have more time in both regions.
The train journey from Switzerland to Italy is well worth it for the views. We passed Lake Maggiore, which was stunning. We also got seats in the family carriage, which had a playground, complete with slide!
We stayed in a flat in Milan and in the morning we dropped our rucksacks off in Stow Your Bags lockers before going to the Leonardo Da Vinci museum, which kept us all amused for a couple of hours. Then it was on the train to Venice via Bologna.
There is no train station, that I have been to so far, like Venice. It is utterly incredible. I highly recommend getting the train across the lagoon simply so you can walk out of the station and say: “Wow!”
The Grand Canal is right in front of you. You’re greeted with the sight of boats, gondolas, and gorgeous architecture on the other side of the river.
We got a river taxi to our flat and got a 3 day travel pass. This meant we could hop on and off river taxis as much as we liked so we took a trip out to the island of Burano, which is full of colourful houses, and another to Giudecca, where we could look back on the main island.
Our children were keen to go on a gondola and we were surprised to find it wasn’t as expensive as we’d thought. After some research, we walked to a gondola station down a back street, to where we’d heard you could go on some of the lesser travelled canals. It was so peaceful! We were the only boat on the river and there weren’t many bridges so we passed very few people. Then we popped out on to the Grand Canal, close to the Rialto Bridge, before looping around to another quiet canal and returning to the gondola station.
Needless to say, Venice was the second real highlight of our trip. We’d love to go back again and spend more time there.
Our next stop, on the high speed train, was Rome. We had found a flat near the Colosseum and it was wonderful to see it every time we stepped our of the door.
We started off with an open top bus tour and then picked a few strategic sites to visit. We booked Colosseum tickets in advance, but not in advance enough to be able to visit the underground levels. If you want to go, book several days ahead. My eldest was disappointed to find it wasn’t as complete as the amphitheatre we saw in Nimes a few years ago (well worth a visit) but we spent the full 90 minutes exploring and learning about what the building had been used for over the centuries. At one point someone lived in it as a castle!
I got a lesson in doing your homework first after getting excited about the Roman baths only to find they had been pretty much destroyed and the building repurposed. It does house a good museum though.
The highlight was the Roman Forum. There are actually four of them, and while they are ruined, they are a spectacular sight.
One of our dilemmas in planning the trip had been how to get from Rome back to Paris. You can go back through Switzerland. We contemplated a night bus at one point. In the end, we decided to go via Turin, which a friend recommended.
We stayed in a gorgeous hotel by the train station and found Turin to be a beautiful city with colonnades, squares, and the spectacular Mole Antonelliana tower, which houses the National Museum of Cinema. We didn’t go in, but we admired the outside.
Then we went in search of food and discovered a lovely restaurant selling padellino pizza, which we had never heard of. It’s a speciality from Turin: pizza cooked in a pan and it’s delicious. Our waiter also urged us to try the farinata, a flat pizza made from chickpea flour, which was also really good.
Next morning we left our bags at the hotel and headed to Turin’s famous Egyptian museum. There was an interesting exhibition about colour and how different pigments were used in ancient Egyption decoration, as well as how you can take inspiration from Egyptian art. Then we went into the museum’s vast collection and spent time exploring different artefacts until it was time to head for our train.
The trip from Turin to Paris was unusual. The family carriage was a compartment, us and another family of four, with doors separating us from the rest of the train on either side of the seats. It takes about 5 hours but 3.5 hours in, we were still not that far from Turin. The train has to make its way through the Alps, serving several small stations, until it gets close to Lyon, then it becomes a high speed service to Paris.
My Parisian hotel planning wasn’t quite as good as elsewhere. Our first hotel was a 10 minute walk from the Eurostar terminal at Gare du Nord in Paris, perfect for arriving in the evening with two children who needed dinner, depositing bags and going out. The hotel check in was smooth. But then we headed to the lift to go up to the 5th floor to find it wasn’t big enough to fit us in. It was the smallest lift I think I’ve ever been in, about the size of a 2-person sofa. So we walked up five flights of stairs with our 60lb bags on our backs.
When we arrived back in Paris, we had to trek for 15 minutes with the bags from Gare du Lyon to Gare d’Austerlitz and go up several flights of steps on the Metro. Then we found the flat only to discover there was no lift.
We booked a late afternoon Eurostar back to London so that we could spend time in Paris. Once again, we used Stow Your Bags so we were free to explore. My youngest couldn’t remember visiting the Eiffel Tower when he was 6-years-old, which meant there was a delighted cry of astonishment when he saw it from the top deck of the double decker Metro train as we crossed the Seine.
An hour’s walk along the banks of the Seine and it was time for us to pick the bags up and head home.
| What worked well | What I would do differently next time |
| Most things really! All the connections worked, the hotels and flats were pleasant, sometimes surprisingly luxurious for what we paid, and we all had a really good time. | Letting the wanderlust take me. I could have knocked out a stop in favour of more time in one place. Also, while the high speed train from Venice to Rome is good, going to Rome in August was not my best idea because it was so hot! |
| This one is going to sound a bit privileged but saying yes to things. The Jungfraujoch is an expensive trip, we hadn’t planned on going in the gondola, we bought gelato twice a day but we were there and having made the journey, we decided to relax and enjoy the experience. | We would have saved money if we had booked train tickets for the journeys that weren’t covered on the pass in advance. You also need to book seats and on one train, it proved tricky to get four together. |
| We invested in new rucksacks with suitcase openings and a detachable day bag from Decathlon. So many pockets! They held everything we needed. | We packed the children’s trainers, which were familiar, to give them a break from their walking shoes. They happily stuck with the walking shoes and we could have saved space and weight! |
| Not planning too much. We opted for one or two things a day with plenty of rest so it didn’t matter on days when we decided to laze around. | I made and printed journals for the kids to write in as a memento. My youngest coloured it in beautifully, only for it to get ruined when a water bottle leaked. Next time, make sure anything precious is safe in a waterproof sleeve. |
| Moving on instead of going somewhere and coming back again. I was worried the children wouldn’t like continually changing where they slept but they were fine with it. | Don’t bother packing so many snacks! We left on my son’s birthday so we had cake with us, which was fair enough. But in a parental ‘what if the children don’t like anything?’ panic, I packed their favourite crisps and other bits. When we went around supermarkets, I kept spotting things we had lugged around with us. |
Tell me about your adventures! Where have you been that you would recommend? And if you’ve got any questions about where we went or how we did things, let me know in the comments.
