How Interrailing through Europe helped me find my way back

I dragged my little periwinkle-blue suitcase, my faithful companion, up the marble stairs of Stazione Centrale, that vast station built under Mussolini’s regime. With my Interrail Pass tucked in my back pocket, I climbed aboard my first InterCity train, beginning my European rail journey.

Thick carpets and broad, comfortable armchairs cocooned me, fondly reminiscent of another era. I sat at a table across from an older nonna who fell asleep almost the moment we pulled away. As the train eased out of the station, I exhaled a huge sigh of relief I felt all across my body.

This year has been one of the hardest of my adult life, a tender threshold of questions and decisions I couldn’t keep putting off. For months I had been feeling incredibly anxious and stuck. I had spent years trying to build a life that looked settled, convincing myself that if I could finally stay put in one place I’d become the person I was supposed to be. But the more I tried, the further away I seemed to drift. I’d stopped seeing movement as something that nourished me, treating it instead as an impulse I ought to outgrow. Sitting on that train, watching Milan dissolve into the countryside, I realised I wasn’t craving escape but a whole different way of being.

The sweet nonna opposite me woke somewhere near Genoa. “Buongiorno.” I said to her with a little smile.

“Buongiorno,” she smiled back.

I offered her a clementine from my bag, which she accepted with a smile before asking whether I was travelling alone. I told her I was, that I was writing about the journey.

“E lei?”

She opened her phone and showed me a photograph of her granddaughter, a young woman with deep dimples who she was on her way to visit. Not long afterwards she drifted back to sleep. Somewhere inside the long tunnel beyond Genoa, I did too.

I was awoken by the suited conductor, coffee cups gently trembling on little tables as the train edged along the Mediterranean coast. European accents drifted through the carriage, conversations rising and falling in Italian, French, Swiss German. Each stop brought a subtle reshuffle, as beach bags and espresso cups came and went. The journey offered a window into the continent itself, each carriage a fleeting vignette of European life.

After San Remo, the sea turned a deeper, almost impossible turquoise, tall spikes of blue and violet growing wild along the tracks, an enormous cactus standing improbably on the hillside. Ventimiglia appeared beyond the glass, the last Italian town before the French border. Almost imperceptibly, the landscape shifted again. Soft hills gave way to sharp cliffs, tunnels cut through the rock and announcements changed from Italian into French.

The train pulled into Menton around midday. The scent of orange blossom filled the warm air before I’d even left the station. Then came lemon trees, pastel shutters in turquoise, blue and pink, jacaranda and bougainvillaea spilling over the stone walls of the old city. The whole town felt suspended outside ordinary time, a world apart from the French Riviera’s flashier resort towns.

I wandered down towards the old Bastion on the seafront, designed by Jean Cocteau, among 20th-century France’s great artistic shapeshifters. Menton was one of his great loves, and he left his fingerprints all over the town. Whatever Cocteau happened to be making, he always called himself a poet. To him, poetry wasn’t a medium but a way of seeing the world, whether expressed through film, drawing or theatre.

There was something deeply liberating about that. I’d spent so much of the last few years trying to define myself through one thing, to be more disciplined, focused, linear. Cocteau transcended such boundaries, trusting that the form would reveal itself afterwards. Perhaps there was something to be said for travelling that way, too, letting a journey unfold rather than deciding exactly where it should lead.

I boarded the train to Marseille the following morning. The carriage was quieter this time, sunlight pouring through generous windows as the Côte d’Azur flickered by: swimmers tucked into hidden coves, little harbours and pine trees leaning towards the sea.

Further west, the earth turned red, layers of clay curving through the scrub. Something within me stirred, responding to the particular spaciousness of a train, watching each mile unfold instead of disappearing beneath the wing of a plane. Thoughts surfaced that had been waiting beneath the noise.

I arrived at Marseille Saint-Charles, the station high above the city. It has always felt like a place shaped by arrivals: North African bakeries sit beside tiny cafés, Tunisian and Algerian restaurants spill onto the pavements, markets hum with languages from every corner of the Mediterranean, somehow all held together by the sea. Within half an hour you can be swimming in clear coves before wandering back through Le Panier with a gelato in hand.

Later, I wandered towards Notre-Dame de la Garde, Marseille’s “Good Mother”, who has watched over sailors returning safely to this port for generations. Somewhere along the way I passed the apartment where I had stayed years before, during another season of my life when everything felt uncertain. I looked up at the window where a younger version of myself had spent long evenings wondering what came next, grappling with questions that felt impossibly heavy, convinced she needed to become someone else before she could begin the life she really wanted.

What surprised me wasn’t sadness but tenderness. Looking up at that window, I could finally see how much she had been carrying. She wasn’t behind, nor failing. She was simply living through those questions, one day at a time, long before she had the language or the courage to act on what she already sensed.

The hardest journeys I’ve made have rarely been geographical. They’ve been the ones that asked an older version of myself to fall away before I could find my way back. Travel asks something similar of us. It takes us out of the familiar and, if we’re lucky, offers enough perspective to return with clarity we couldn’t have found by staying still.

I boarded my onward train the following morning, another border crossing ahead and a sense of possibility in the air. Windows stretched from end to end, just the sounds of the clicking tracks and my thoughts.

Looking back, I don’t think my journey provided new answers, but it gave me distance to realise what I already knew had to change. Between European borders and stations, I remembered that movement has never been a distraction from my life; it’s one of the ways I return to myself. It took a train journey across the Mediterranean coast – with its unfurling landscapes, conversations with strangers and room to reflect – to recognise the person I’d been becoming all along.

Prices start from €239 for 5 travel days within one month. Plan your journey at  interrail.com.