We swapped our beach holiday for Interrailing – my 16-year-old daughter loved it ...Middle East

Last autumn, my family and I decided to ditch our annual beach break in favour of an Interrailing holiday through Italy. We all had to rethink our expectations.  

“Will there be a beach, dad?” asked my 16-year-old daughter Tara, as her 13-year-old sister Emma leaned in to hear.

While we weren’t making any beach stops, I reminded them of how many places we’d see while travelling by rail. 

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Our journey didn’t start at Milano Centrale; it began at our kitchen table. One of the joys of an Interrail holiday is pouring over maps and hatching plans together. The girls were excited by all the places we would see en route.

We’d being stopping at five cities – Milan, Como, Florence, Venice and Verona – and be taking in epic landscapes, including Lake Como, the distant Dolomites, the north Italian plains and the drama of the Venetian lagoon. 

It had been decades since I rode Europe’s rails. My first experience of Interrailing was in the early 1990s, and that opened my eyes to the variety of wonderful places to visit in Europe. I wanted to pass that sense of wonder on to my girls. Italy really stood out on my travels, so to share the likes of Venice’s Grand Canal and Milan’s Duomo was a joy.

But I’ve changed, and so has Interrail. There’s no more faffing around etching in journeys on a dog-eared paper pass. These days you buy your pass online and then swish around using an easy to navigate app.

There are still big choices to make. You could take the train to the continent from London. Or fly to your first rail stop to save time. You could opt for a Global Pass that covers 33 countries or a one-country Pass. You could choose between a Continuous Pass and a Flexipass for a set number of days of travel. As we live in Edinburgh, we chose to fly and focus on Italy. We treated ourselves to a first-class pass with five days of travel in a month (£162 more than standard class). It proved simple to use. Making reservations via the app was handy and easy, too. Plus, we were able to load all of our four passes on to one app.

We didn’t encounter any Interrail downsides. I met a fellow rail traveller who said he had found advance individual tickets that were cheaper than an Interrail pass, but he was travelling solo, and I found the passes for our family eased a lot of stress. It also gave us total flexibility on where to go. I stacked it against prices at station ticket machines – our trip would have cost at least double if we had bought individual tickets for each train journey. These savings would have been even greater if we’d taken longer journeys.

I’ve sometimes felt guilty on family beach holidays that we weren’t doing enough, seeing enough, engaging the kids’ brains enough. That wasn’t an issue while we were Interrailing. The girls became avid trainspotters, enthused by the trains, stations and departure boards.

At Milano Centrale, one of Europe’s grandest railway stations – with a vaulted glass and stone high ceiling – they scanned the departure boards for our train and skipped off to find our platform. They threw themselves into leading the way at every station.

Our first train ride was a gentle introduction as we dipped our toes in the rail waters with the short hop to Lake Como. A night at the Lake Como Hilton, where the rooftop pool looks out over the lake and a vaulting panorama of mountains, eased us into the holiday, before a ferry spirited us up to Varenna, where we rejoined the Italian rail network bound for Milan and our first high speed train.

Our first-class passes were a worthwhile investment, ensuring we had more space, a complimentary snack and drink and calm journeys – the antithesis of many people’s experience of UK trains. First Class was more plush than the UK’s, with big windows and plenty of luggage room.

Whooshing across the Italian countryside on our Frecciarossa high-speed train, we peered at passing towns and cities, the girls Googling ones that caught their eye. With our Interrail pass we could have hopped off at any. The girls seemed to love this freedom and Tara was already planning Interrailing trips with her pals.

We didn’t jump off at Padua or Vicenza – not when Venice tempted at the end of the line. There is nothing quite like stepping off a train and descending the steps to the Grand Canal into the Serene Republic. Channelling my old, budget Interrail attitude, we checked into the Generator Hostel on Giudecca, where we met another family travelling by train. My fears about the beach to train switch dissolved completely as our kids exchanged stories and discussed where they might head next.

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The girls wanted the romance of Verona. We swooned around the nonsensical trail of the non-existent lovers, seeing the balcony where the fictional Romeo courted Juliet, and her tragic tomb. “It could have been true,” Emma insisted; I countered that Shakespeare probably never even visited Italy and we got into a sweeping debate about him and his work – not something we usually discuss at the beach.

We had planned on heading back to Milan, but the allure of Florence proved too much. Wrapped in David, gelato and Brunelleschi’s Duomo. These bite-sized forays into Italian cities were very much in keeping with the train travel romance.

Boarding our Milano Centrale-bound train, Tara and Emma were sad, realising that this was our last journey on the rails. “Can we do this again next year and maybe go around all of Europe?” Tara asked, all thoughts of beach holidays dissolved in the sheer joy of a family adventure that brought rail rewards for us all.

Booking it

Robin’s First Class passes cost £884 for two adults and two teenagers for a Flexipass, with five days travel in month. Second Class £722. Rail Europe can also book train tickets from London to Milan, with one-way tickets starting at about £50 per person, raileurope.com.

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