A Mother-Daughter Train Journey for the Books

As the train pulled out of Istanbul’s Bakırköy Station in the general direction of Paris, our cabin steward Eduardo poured the first of what would be many glasses of Champagne over the next six days. Crystal flute in hand, I settled into one of the plush (and firmly anchored to the floor) upholstered seats across from my mom and raised my glass. The Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train, Europe uses carriages dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. Just a week earlier, I had called her with a last-minute ask: Could she fly from my hometown in Wisconsin to join me on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express? We’d booked her tickets moments later. As a travel writer, this wasn’t the first (or the last) time I would reach out with a plus one for a soon-departing trip, but it was one of the most special occasions: over 40 years after she’d first read Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, she still carried a fantasy of traveling on the iconic train. Now, as a recently retired librarian, she was at the start of the train’s crawl from Istanbul to Paris, with the keys to the very same sleeper carriage (Sleeping Car 3309) that had inspired Christie’s novel. The write