My mum had just one stipulation when it came to our mother-and-daughter holiday: she didn’t want to do any of the planning. She would not lift a finger – payback, perhaps, for my tricky teenage years, which saw me ruin one Pyrenean road trip by vomiting on every hairpin. I tried to claim it was food poisoning rather than the result of a night of underage drinking with the campsite bad lads. Mum, who had seen a lot in her career as an NHS psychiatrist in Morecambe, was having none of it.
I suggested taking her Interrailing after she said she was envious of a solo rail trip I’d taken a few years ago. Dad tried to muscle in, but we rebuffed him: three is a bad number for a holiday and I might have regressed to childhood if outnumbered.
Being lucky enough to possess healthy parents, I have not yet had to make decisions about their lives and so it felt novel to be entrusted with our itinerary. Mum, an active 75, said she would rather go north than south, so I set about planning a route that took us from Manchester all the way to Oslo.
We were away for 10 nights, our first-class passes entitling us to seven days of travel within a month, across the 33-country Interrail network. It doesn’t cost much more to go first class – £413 for ages 28-59, and £373 for over-60s, compared with £326/£294 had we gone second class. The ticket includes an inward and outward journey in the UK, so we recouped the cost just on the Manchester-to-London leg, which now comes in at a heart-stopping £535 for an anytime first-class return on Avanti West Coast.
First class generally gets you comfier seats with more leg room. Anything else is a bonus. Avanti may be unreliable, but it does excellent free first-class breakfasts – a full English for me and smoked salmon and scrambled eggs for mum. This turns out to be the high-point of complimentary northern European railway catering. We only get fed on one other leg of our 1,753-mile, 16-train, six-country odyssey: a very dry Ryvita-type cracker covered with pesto on Danish railways.
We take the Eurostar to Brussels and then head on to Hamburg, where I’d pre-booked tickets for the viewing “plaza” on the shimmering Elbphilharmonie (€3), Hamburg’s answer to the Sydney Opera House. If I’d…
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