That evening, as we dined on turbot filets and toasted with more pours of Champagne before being rocked back to sleep, the train crossed into Hungary. By morning, we had pulled into Budapest and, even before departing Nyugati Station (built by the French Eiffel Company), our local guide Edina had a surprise for us: keys to the generally-closed-to-the-public Royal Waiting Hall and its ornate rooms, built for Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Sisi in the late 1800s. What followed was a sugar high of an afternoon filled with slices of esterházy (a delightful walnut cake) and dobostorta (a traditional sponge cake with a hardened caramel top) across a few of city’s historic cafés—including Művész Kávéház, New York Café, and Café Gerbeaud—the steady stream of historical context and old world charm offered a rolling source of joy for my history-obsessed parent and an apt parallel to the bygone era of the train itself.
While the off-train experiences were undoubtedly special, the most memorable moments of our trip happened during the in-betweens on board. Between waking and the first coffee of the day; between breakfast in our suite and lunch in one of the meticulously restored dining cars; between cocktails and dinner and after-dinner drinks, each paired with a mesmeric new landscape gently drifting by. A true librarian’s kid, one of my favorite things to do anywhere in the world with my mom has always been to simply be in the same space, books open between us. In those quiet, rolling hours that link together a day on the tracks, there were plenty of moments for just that. For the first time in my life, however, every time I looked up from my page, my mom wasn’t absorbed in her book—instead, her gaze was focused out the window.
Our last night on board was a raucous one. Surrounded by fellow travelers from Istanbul, England, Japan and France, with the resident pianist taking requests on the baby grand, I sat tucked in the corner of one of the moody blue velvet sofas in the bar car. As I nursed a martini, I watched my mom in animated conversation, lit up by the adventures of the last few days, the kindness of new friends and the bucket list feeling of being aboard the storied train car. What an incredible privilege to get to travel in general; an even bigger one to do so alongside one of the best people I know.
The five-night Istanbul-Paris route and its mirror Paris-Istanbul journey on the Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express each run twice in 2026, starting at $53,310 USD per passenger. This year also sees the launch of Villeggiatura by Train: a four-part series of itineraries linking Paris to Venice, the Amalfi Coast, Florence, or Portofino, respectively.
