And while we don’t know the Prague train station at all, Mimi finds platform twelve on the first try.

Even Kitty is impressed.

We do make the mistake of getting on at the wrong end of the train and, as a result, have to squeeze our way past passengers and step over luggage stacked up in the aisles. And we’re still walking from car to car when the train lurches out of the station, tossing me against a large man who is not all that friendly, especially when he discovers that I don’t have the language and can’t appreciate the full extent of his grievance.

But eventually, we do find our seats.

Mimi settles in next to the window. I take the aisle. When we travel in a country where we don’t speak the language, it doesn’t matter if the train is crowded or empty. We’re on our own, and unless dumb luck intervenes and drops an English-speaking tourist in our laps, the only person we’ll be talking to for the next six hours is each other.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Sometimes when you’re hungry, you get grumpy.”

“I’m not grumpy.”

“But you don’t think going to Budapest is a good idea.”

“It’s an adventure.”

“Here,” says Mimi. “Eat a banana.”

“I don’t want a banana.”

“Eat it anyway.”

The train from Prague to Budapest is not as well appointed as the train in the 2017 remake of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, with its ornate and opulent carriages all tucked up with brocade upholstery and heavy draperies, soft surfaces and shaded spaces.

A Victorian parlour on wheels.

Our train is iron and steel, cold and brutal, a Trans-Siberian prisoner transport on its way to a gulag.

“It’s not that bad,” Mimi says. “Beats driving the 401 at rush hour.”

Twenty minutes into the trip, an older woman steps into our carriage and sits down. I smile. She smiles. I look out the window with a practised nonchalance and begin my Sherlockian deductions.

WE WENT TO GREECE after the financial collapse and before the big fires. Mimi spent a good month planning the trip.

“First we’ll go to Crete,” said Mimi.

“Crete?”

“Then we’ll stop in Santorini. We can’t go to Greece without seeing Crete and Santorini.”

In Chania, we stayed in the Palazzo di Pietro on Agion Deka, a small hotel run by a daughter and her father. We toured Old Town, wandered the narrow streets, stopped at the shops and the open-air craft booths, ate at small restaurants recommended in the guidebook. We walked the seawall that protected the harbour and got an Australian couple to take a picture of us in front of the Venetian lighthouse.