It’s August already, and I’m finally sitting down to put this piece together about a whirlwind three-day continental European adventure over New Year’s 2026. My oldest and I took the trip to ride the rails, and it was a particularly special experience for my kiddo, who handled all the planning and logistics. My job was considerably easier: sign the check, show up, and follow along so I didn’t get lost.
We left Palma on the 31st, on a discount airline. Our trip budget was tight, so we made sure to pack everything we would need into the smallest bags possible to meet the “Personal Item” bag allowance of the airline. We each got away with a backpack, and a camera slung across our bodies.
It’s kind of funny to me that I used to travel in my early 20’s without any real preparation or contingency planning. I would stuff a few things in my backpack, and off I would go. These days I have a hard time even conceiving of that. Now I worry about cuts and scrapes (bandaids and ointment into the bag), proper hydration (water bottle into the bag), and what feels like a thousand other bits and bobs (all into the bag!). This trip was about as close to those old days as I’ve been in a couple of decades.
I used to travel in my early 20’s without any real preparation or contingency planning.
When we landed in Berlin, we took the commuter train to Berlin Hauptbahnhof station. It is a modern glass structure with a multi-story train station inside that houses tracks crossing everywhere.
As readers of this website will probably remember, my oldest loves trains — and, really, so do I. One of the main ideas of this trip was to see as many trains and types of trains as possible. Throughout the trip, my learned child taught me which train lines and types of trains we were seeing at each station. At this point, eight months later, I cannot recall much of any of it.
For this trip we planned to minimize cost by not booking any accommodations; instead, we chose only overnight trains to get two birds out of our relatively meager grouping of stones. On the way to Budapest, we were alone in our compartment so it really felt quite spacious.
We arrived in the morning, and our return was scheduled for late afternoon. For the morning we kept our sightseeing to areas within easy walking distance of the train station. The weather in Budapest was not terribly cold. But, coming from Mallorca, the winter weather of Hungary put a damper on us. My heaviest outer layer these days is a Levis denim jacket, and my kiddo was making do with a pull-over hoodie.
When the walking got too much for us, we took a break and hopped on a tram to see a little bit more of the city. A special destination for this trip was the city train depot.
Our only view of the Hungarian Parliament Building as we crossed the Danube by Tram.
We took the overnight train from Budapest back to Berlin that night. I recall a little stress at the start of the return journey, when certain cars were closed and we had to be reassigned seats on the fly. We made it without a problem, but it was one of those situations where we weren’t entirely sure what was going on — or, more importantly, whether we were doing the right thing.
We arrived in Berlin the next morning and spent some time exploring the S-Bahn, the city’s local train system. We found a spot in the city where we could walk around and explore a little, while still being confident that we could make it to the airport in time for our flight back home to Mallorca.
The reality is we could have spent days or even weeks in either of these two cities. To say we barely scratched the surface would potentially suggest we saw more than we actually did. What we did see, and more importantly what we did, was experience some of Europe’s great rail infrastructure, along with the tiniest blip of two world-class cities!