She decided that she was probably going to like her great-aunt when a brown paper parcel arrived from her, sent by express delivery. It came on Saturday during breakfast. There was a letter on stiff headed paper saying how pleased Great-Aunt Elodie was, a picture postcard of Istanbul, a very ugly hand-knitted bobble hat (“For your travels across an Eastern European winter!”) and two envelopes with tickets in. Max thought it was a friendly sort of parcel to send, even if the hat was a bit monstrous.

She opened up her packet of tickets, and was surprised to find four. She placed them in a line along the kitchen table. They were train tickets: from Paris to Munich, from Munich to Budapest, from Budapest to Bucharest, and from Bucharest to Istanbul.

“Are we going by train, then?” she asked.

Her mother sighed. “Your great-aunt doesn’t trust aeroplanes, apparently.”

Max couldn’t help feeling that this was a bit beside the point, as her great-aunt was very much staying where she was. But she didn’t protest. The trains sounded fun – two of them were overnight trains, and her mother explained that she would have a bunk to sleep in on board. And although she wouldn’t have any time to explore Munich and Bucharest, she would have a whole day in Budapest. She looked up the cities in her atlas. Munich was in Germany. Budapest was in Hungary. Bucharest was in Romania. Max had heard of those places in geography, but she had no idea what they would look like. She whispered the names to herself.

Pierre was working on chess moves on the other side of the table, and he started glaring at her, so she scooped up her tickets and went to the attic to do her whispering there. As she left, Pierre was muttering that she was way too young and would definitely get homesick, but Max had learned that she could save a lot of time by not listening to Pierre. Munich. Budapest. Bucharest. Istanbul.

The next day she went to the library, and borrowed every book about Munich-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul that she could find. The early darkness of winter evenings meant she did most of her reading by the light of a slightly broken lamp, as the attic didn’t have an overhead light. She read about palaces and mosques and rivers and churches and lost kings and queens and battles. She read about the places in between, too, the places that the trains would pass through. She gave up making notes about her life in Paris, and made notes about the journey instead. This is the map she drew: