My wife and I explored Europe by train for 2 weeks on our honeymoon, and it's the best money I've ever spent

• After our wedding in 2018, my wife and I traveled through Europe by train for two weeks.
• The next year, we took a month off work and traveled from Mongolia to Copenhagen by train.

When I met my wife, Robin-Marie, we bonded over a shared interest in the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

It’s the longest railway line in the world and it’ll take you from Moscow to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast in about a week.

Riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad and stopping along the way seemed like an amazing adventure, so it was our first choice for a honeymoon.

But even though we take commuter trains to work, we weren’t sure how we’d cope with an eight-day ride.

We didn’t want to find out that we hated it while sitting somewhere in Siberia with no other way to get home — so we made a plan

Our honeymoon consisted of 2 main parts with different train lines

For the first part of our honeymoon, we bought Interrail Tickets, which gave us a free pass on European trains in 33 countries for two weeks.

Pass prices can change but, for reference, two 15-day, second-class passes for adults can cost about 986 euros, or just over $1,000.

Eight months later, we embarked on our Trans-Siberian trip.

Overall, traveling by train came with major perks

I hate flying, so I have every reason to like trains, even if for no other reason than that they keep me out of planes.

But there are plenty more reasons we loved traveling Europe — and, later, Russia — by train:

• Trains are slow. This might seem counterintuitive, but traveling slow is great when it’s for pleasure. While sitting on the train, we had time to talk, read, listen to podcasts, and look at the landscape passing by. We got brief looks into Czech mountain forests, tiny Hungarian villages, and many other places we would never have seen otherwise.

• You meet new people. This was especially true in Russia, where we spent long stretches of time with whoever was sharing our compartment. Though most people only spoke a little English and we knew no Russian, we communicated through a translator app.

• You can get off the train anytime you want. This was mostly the case in Europe, where our Interrail passes allowed us to decide on a whim if we wanted to stop to explore somewhere that looked cool. We spent a lot of time looking around smaller Central European towns while waiting for the next train, and we had some delicious food along the way.

Our rides weren’t perfect, but it was a great adventure

Of course, not everything was great.

The worst part was the lack of food on the European trains. We had some long, hunger-filled rides before finally, on the very last train, we found a nice dining car.

This problem could’ve been solved if we brought food with us — and it wouldn’t have been an issue if it hadn’t been for my perpetual, unfounded belief that the next train would surely serve food.

All in all, our train honeymoon was an amazing adventure. The global pandemic and the birth of our daughter in July 2020, have so far put a stop to our train traveling, but I’m sure we’ll take it up again in a couple of years.

I, for one, can’t wait to see where we’ll be going next and what we’ll see on the way.