Auden is gurgling on a picnic blanket when I meet her and her mum, Kate Ivory, in a local park.

Tower Bridge looms behind, the midday sun glinting off its gilded tips. It’s a postcard-perfect setting, but I imagine at this point, it’s just another landmark on a long list for this well-travelled seven-month-old, who has seen a huge arc of Europe already.

The mother and baby have just returned from an epic rail voyage across the Continent, a journey that took them from their home in east London to King’s Cross St Pancras and finished in Pisa, stopping in Germany, Austria, Slovenia and northern Italy on the way. In all, their route took 25 days.

When most new parents would rather, understandably, stay at home and work out how to keep their brand new human alive, single mother Kate booked an Interrail pass, loaded up the pram and took her first-born on a debut tour of the EU. So what made her do it?

Kate’s practical advice for globetrotting parents

• Cram that pram: You need a solid pram that’s going to get you about. Make sure it’s serviced before you go, and everything fits on it, so you don’t have to carry a single thing. If you need to put your baby in a sling, or get to a train fast, it’s much easier.

• Route: Plan the journey so you know roughly where you’re going, but leave room for flexibility. The Interrail pass lets you change trains up to 20 minutes before departure.

• Age: Auden was six months old when we left and turned seven while we were away. I noticed how much harder it was at the end of the trip, because she was crawling more. You could do it with an older baby, but it would look like a different trip.

• Accommodation: Be clear on what you want; for me, that was air-con and a cot. I always looked for places near the station, so I could put my bag in the station lockers, enjoy the city for the day, and then hop on a train out in the evening.

• You do you: You don’t have to tailor your itinerary to a baby. We went to a palace with gilded ceilings in Turin, and Auden was fascinated, staring up at it. She loved the things I loved.

• Back yourself: It’s normal to worry, but just trust your instincts. Also, there’s a world of lovely people out there who will genuinely help you.

“Travelling the world after uni changed my entire outlook on life”, explains 38-year-old Kate, who works in advertising.

“When I went on mat leave, I knew I’d never have this block of free time again. I wanted Auden to come into the world with her eyes open and experience different things. Plus, we were about to start weaning, so it was a good time to go. Her first food could be pasta in Italy!”

From pasta in Italy to schnitzel in Austria, and all between breastfeeding, Kate filled Auden’s baby passport pages as much as her stomach. Even more astoundingly, she did it solo.

“I wanted Auden to come into the world with her eyes open and experience different things”

“I’ve got friends, family and a partner, but I chose to have Auden on my own. I wanted us to have high-quality bonding time, just us,” Kate explains.

“Interrailing is a good way to experience lots of different things at once without boarding a series of flights. Plus, from a money perspective, it’s budget-friendly. I bought the Global Pass (£320), which gives you seven days of travel to use within a month,” she says.

With so many possible destinations and routes on offer — 33 countries are covered in the Global Pass, including overnight trains — I wonder if working out the route was the first challenge.

“I used ChatGPT to plan the route”

Kate turned to the AI tool, keeping her prompts specific, with requests for pram-accessible trains and quieter departures to avoid rush hour. Mostly, the responses were helpful, she says, but not always infallible. “There were a few times here and there where ChatGPT told me to get a train, but there wasn’t one — only buses.”

Does a trip with an infant in tow require military-grade logistics? “We only had the first two nights and the first train booked”, Kate reveals. “After that, I booked the next leg as we went. It keeps things exciting, it keeps you free. If you arrive somewhere and think, I don’t like it here, you can just get up and go somewhere else.”

“Most countries are way more baby-friendly than the UK, and people I encountered on the trip were so helpful”

“I didn’t worry about safety at all”

Perhaps it’s this free-spiritedness and iron confidence that makes Kate fearless. When I begin to ask if she worried about safety, she tells me it didn’t cross her mind before I’ve even finished my sentence.

“We live in London!” she chuckles. “Most countries are way more baby-friendly than the UK, and people I encountered on the trip were so helpful”.

Though there were some exceptions: “When I crossed into Italy, it was like, “Ooh beautiful baby! Okay, bye!” and they left me with the pram at the top of the stairs,” says Kate.

“To be honest, I didn’t worry at all,” Kate says as Auden wrestles with the picnic blanket next to us. “Lots of people worried about it for me. They’d ask, ‘Why are you going?’ ‘Have you really thought about this?’ ‘You’re going to be on your own, where will you stay?’”

So where do you stay with a baby when you’re travelling on a budget? Not hostels? Actually, yes. “I just booked a private room instead of a dorm, because honestly, who wants to share with a baby?” says Kate.

“I tried to get cots, but if not, we just shared a bed. The only thing I wanted – which I wouldn’t have cared about had I gone on my own – was air-con, because it was so hot.”

Other beds for the night included local hotels or Airbnbs. With overnight trains an option, Kate and Auden tried that too. “Our longest train ride was seven hours. After that, I swore we’d never do more than four hours at a time,” Kate admits.

“She didn’t love it, I didn’t love it. Was it worth the stress to catch an overnight train? “We were going to go directly from Munich to Ljubliana, but I changed the plan to stop in Salzburg to break up the journey, and it ended up being one of the best bits of the trip,” she says.

Along with Austria, Kate’s highlights included hiking up an Alpine mountain with Auden, taking in the view from her baby sling. “I wanted to take my proper hiking backpack, but I just couldn’t carry it along with the pram. We had one backpack between us that could fit under the pram, another little bag for her stuff, and that’s it, because I needed to be able to fold the pram up.”

Anyone who has holidayed with kids in tow knows that travelling light isn’t an option. Kate stripped her travel wardrobe right back to the basics. As for Auden, “It was 80 per cent her stuff. I vacuum-packed everything down into our backpack.” She bought essentials like nappies and wipes as they went, cleverly buying a pack after a long leg so she wasn’t weighed down by carrying a huge supply.

For food and activities like museum entries, Kate stuck to a bootstrap budget of €20 a day, in addition to accommodation, which was about €60 a night. It helped that her Interrail pass had been pre-purchased.

Kate’s recommended baby essentials

I’ve got this UV blanket that has magnets on it, so Auden couldn’t get sunburnt. I’d wrap her up like a burrito in it.

The Bugaboo pram was amazing, because you can put everything on it and clip things to it. I was umming and erring about getting it, but the strain I put on it saw us through the trip.

The Rockit because it rocks the pram by itself and helps Auden sleep. And a little bag of toys so she could play. She doesn’t need much at six months.

“I was strict, but anything that didn’t get spent would roll over to the next day’s budget, so there were funds to play with”. With Auden still breastfeeding, Kate would give her small snacks to try from farmers’ markets.

“If you ask, in Italy they’ll sometimes do a baby aperitivo; a plate of things she could eat – breadsticks, small bits of melon, things like that,” explains Kate.

It all sounds very Eat, Pray, Love: the baby edition. Surely it can’t have all been plain sailing? “There were a couple of times in Slovenia, where the trains kept getting like cancelled or switched to buses” Kate recalls.

“Then you’re trying to get on the rail replacement, put your pram down, get your backpack in. It was stressful, but I enjoyed us getting through the gnarly bits together,” she adds. “In the future, when Auden doubts herself, I’ll remind her we went around Europe when she was six months, so she can do anything. This trip is now part of the fabric of us.”

“I could have gone for another couple of weeks. I just ran out of money. And pants.”

The Slovenian episode also had a silver lining: a new friend. “We met Elenka, 82, on a train leaving Salzburg, and ended up spending the day travelling to Ljubljana together. When we had to switch to replacement buses, this 82-year-old charged off with Auden to hold our seats, throwing her suitcase out of the window for me to stow away with the pram, yelling in broken English as she went”.

When they eventually arrived in the city, Elenka walked Kate and Auden to their hostel, and they swapped numbers. Later, Kate found out Elenka had booked her dinner in Ljubljana — and had already picked up the bill.

They probably wouldn’t have crossed paths if it weren’t for the baby. “She’s 82, so what do we have in common?” Kate agrees. “But that’s the magic of travel”.

Other friends included an Irish couple in Trieste who were in town for a James Joyce convention, one of Kate’s favourite poets. “They invited us along, so we ended up joining a James Joyce festival for the day,” Kate laughs.

“I just don’t want her to be scared of the world”, Kate explains, bouncing Auden in her lap. “When we were in Strasburg, a fire engine screamed past, and she, naturally, burst into tears. But later on, a loud helicopter went past and she looked up at me for reassurance and then smiled.

“She’s learning that things aren’t scary just because they’re loud. I’ll always have her back. As my friend Leah said, ‘Isn’t it nice that she wakes up in a new place and sees all these new things, but then she looks at you, and she knows she’s home?’”

Of the trip, Kate says “It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve travelled to so many places, with work, and in life. There’s something so magical about doing it with Auden. I’m seeing it through her eyes.”

“Honestly, I could have gone for another couple of weeks. I just ran out of money. And pants.”

The mother and baby have just returned from an epic rail voyage across the Continent, a journey that took them from their home in east London to King’s Cross St Pancras and finished in Pisa, stopping in Germany, Austria, Slovenia and northern Italy on the way. In all, their route took 25 days.

When most new parents would rather, understandably, stay at home and work out how to keep their brand new human alive, single mother Kate booked an Interrail pass, loaded up the pram and took her first-born on a debut tour of the EU. So what made her do it?

“Travelling the world after uni changed my entire outlook on life”, explains 38-year-old Kate, who works in advertising.

“When I went on mat leave, I knew I’d never have this block of free time again. I wanted Auden to come into the world with her eyes open and experience different things. Plus, we were about to start weaning, so it was a good time to go. Her first food could be pasta in Italy!”

From pasta in Italy to schnitzel in Austria, and all between breastfeeding, Kate filled Auden’s baby passport pages as much as her stomach. Even more astoundingly, she did it solo.

“I’ve got friends, family and a partner, but I chose to have Auden on my own. I wanted us to have high-quality bonding time, just us,” Kate explains.

“Interrailing is a good way to experience lots of different things at once without boarding a series of flights. Plus, from a money perspective, it’s budget-friendly. I bought the Global Pass (£320), which gives you seven days of travel to use within a month,” she says.

With so many possible destinations and routes on offer — 33 countries are covered in the Global Pass, including overnight trains — I wonder if working out the route was the first challenge.

“I used ChatGPT to plan the route”

Kate turned to the AI tool, keeping her prompts specific, with requests for pram-accessible trains and quieter departures to avoid rush hour. Mostly, the responses were helpful, she says, but not always infallible. “There were a few times here and there where ChatGPT told me to get a train, but there wasn’t one — only buses.”

Does a trip with an infant in tow require military-grade logistics? “We only had the first two nights and the first train booked”, Kate reveals. “After that, I booked the next leg as we went. It keeps things exciting, it keeps you free. If you arrive somewhere and think, I don’t like it here, you can just get up and go somewhere else.”

“I didn’t worry about safety at all”

Perhaps it’s this free-spiritedness and iron confidence that makes Kate fearless. When I begin to ask if she worried about safety, she tells me it didn’t cross her mind before I’ve even finished my sentence.

“We live in London!” she chuckles. “Most countries are way more baby-friendly than the UK, and people I encountered on the trip were so helpful”.

Though there were some exceptions: “When I crossed into Italy, it was like, “Ooh beautiful baby! Okay, bye!” and they left me with the pram at the top of the stairs,” says Kate.

“To be honest, I didn’t worry at all,” Kate says as Auden wrestles with the picnic blanket next to us. “Lots of people worried about it for me. They’d ask, ‘Why are you going?’ ‘Have you really thought about this?’ ‘You’re going to be on your own, where will you stay?’”

So where do you stay with a baby when you’re travelling on a budget? Not hostels? Actually, yes. “I just booked a private room instead of a dorm, because honestly, who wants to share with a baby?” says Kate.

“I tried to get cots, but if not, we just shared a bed. The only thing I wanted – which I wouldn’t have cared about had I gone on my own – was air-con, because it was so hot.”

Other beds for the night included local hotels or Airbnbs. With overnight trains an option, Kate and Auden tried that too. “Our longest train ride was seven hours. After that, I swore we’d never do more than four hours at a time,” Kate admits.

“She didn’t love it, I didn’t love it. Was it worth the stress to catch an overnight train? “We were going to go directly from Munich to Ljubliana, but I changed the plan to stop in Salzburg to break up the journey, and it ended up being one of the best bits of the trip,” she says.

Along with Austria, Kate’s highlights included hiking up an Alpine mountain with Auden, taking in the view from her baby sling. “I wanted to take my proper hiking backpack, but I just couldn’t carry it along with the pram. We had one backpack between us that could fit under the pram, another little bag for her stuff, and that’s it, because I needed to be able to fold the pram up.”

Anyone who has holidayed with kids in tow knows that travelling light isn’t an option. Kate stripped her travel wardrobe right back to the basics. As for Auden, “It was 80 per cent her stuff. I vacuum-packed everything down into our backpack.” She bought essentials like nappies and wipes as they went, cleverly buying a pack after a long leg so she wasn’t weighed down by carrying a huge supply.

For food and activities like museum entries, Kate stuck to a bootstrap budget of €20 a day, in addition to accommodation, which was about €60 a night. It helped that her Interrail pass had been pre-purchased.

“I was strict, but anything that didn’t get spent would roll over to the next day’s budget, so there were funds to play with”. With Auden still breastfeeding, Kate would give her small snacks to try from farmers’ markets.

“If you ask, in Italy they’ll sometimes do a baby aperitivo; a plate of things she could eat – breadsticks, small bits of melon, things like that,” explains Kate.

It all sounds very Eat, Pray, Love: the baby edition. Surely it can’t have all been plain sailing? “There were a couple of times in Slovenia, where the trains kept getting like cancelled or switched to buses” Kate recalls.

“Then you’re trying to get on the rail replacement, put your pram down, get your backpack in. It was stressful, but I enjoyed us getting through the gnarly bits together,” she adds. “In the future, when Auden doubts herself, I’ll remind her we went around Europe when she was six months, so she can do anything. This trip is now part of the fabric of us.”

The Slovenian episode also had a silver lining: a new friend. “We met Elenka, 82, on a train leaving Salzburg, and ended up spending the day travelling to Ljubljana together. When we had to switch to replacement buses, this 82-year-old charged off with Auden to hold our seats, throwing her suitcase out of the window for me to stow away with the pram, yelling in broken English as she went”.

When they eventually arrived in the city, Elenka walked Kate and Auden to their hostel, and they swapped numbers. Later, Kate found out Elenka had booked her dinner in Ljubljana — and had already picked up the bill.

They probably wouldn’t have crossed paths if it weren’t for the baby. “She’s 82, so what do we have in common?” Kate agrees. “But that’s the magic of travel”.

Other friends included an Irish couple in Trieste who were in town for a James Joyce convention, one of Kate’s favourite poets. “They invited us along, so we ended up joining a James Joyce festival for the day,” Kate laughs.

“I just don’t want her to be scared of the world”, Kate explains, bouncing Auden in her lap. “When we were in Strasburg, a fire engine screamed past, and she, naturally, burst into tears. But later on, a loud helicopter went past and she looked up at me for reassurance and then smiled.

“She’s learning that things aren’t scary just because they’re loud. I’ll always have her back. As my friend Leah said, ‘Isn’t it nice that she wakes up in a new place and sees all these new things, but then she looks at you, and she knows she’s home?’”

Of the trip, Kate says “It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve travelled to so many places, with work, and in life. There’s something so magical about doing it with Auden. I’m seeing it through her eyes.”

“Honestly, I could have gone for another couple of weeks. I just ran out of money. And pants.”

I’m on a steadily rising road in northern Greece as swallows sweep over the burnished grasses to either side of me and pelicans spiral through the summer sky. Gaining height, the land thickens with oak forests and a Hermann’s tortoise makes a slow, ceremonial turn on to a sheep track at the edge of the asphalt. And then, just as the road briefly levels out before corkscrewing down the other side, a glittering lake appears beneath me – a brilliant blue eye set in a socket of steep mountains. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve crossed the pass into the Prespa basin on my way home from trips into town, but the sight of shimmering Lesser Prespa Lake – often striking blue in the afternoons and silvery at sunset – takes me back to the summer of 2000 when I saw it for the first time.

A little over 25 years ago, my wife and I read a glowing review of a book about the Prespa lakes region. In the north-west corner of Greece and an hour’s drive from the towns of Florina and Kastoria, the two Prespa lakes straddle the borders of Greece, Albania and North Macedonia in a basin of about 618 sq miles. We’d never heard of Prespa until then, but the review of Giorgos Catsadorakis’s Prespa: A Story for Man and Nature got us thinking about a holiday there, imagining a week or two of walking in the mountains, birding around the summer shores and enjoying food in village tavernas at night.

When the book finally arrived at our London flat, at a time when we were talking seriously about living somewhere else, it took just a single evening (and, to be fair, a couple of bottles of wine) to decide to leave the city behind. Not for a holiday, but to try to make a home for ourselves in the Prespa national park. Twenty-five years later, we’re still in the village we moved to – Agios Germanos.

I park the car near the pass and walk further into the hills on a path worn smooth by shepherds and their animals. It’s high summer and there’s a languor to the landscape. Clouds of butterflies drift on the hot air and a hoopoe raises its magnificent crest in an oak. From up here I can now see Great Prespa Lake as well, separated from its smaller neighbour by a wide and sandy isthmus. These two ancient lakes, thought to be in the region of 3-5 million years old, are almost entirely encircled by a bowl of mountains, making it feel a world apart when you cross into the basin. Although the water levels in the lakes have dropped significantly because of climate change in recent decades, Prespa remains a place of extraordinary vitality.

Looking north over the rolling oak forests, I can see the rough point in the lake where Greece, Albania and North Macedonia meet. Prespa is a crossroads not only of countries but of geologies too, resulting in an extraordinary profusion and abundance of wild species – almost three times as many butterfly species (172) can be found on the Greek side of Prespa than in the whole of the UK (59).

I look up as a mixed group of Dalmatian and great white pelicans lowers towards Lesser Prespa Lake. Seeing these birds in flight, carried across the mountains on wings that can have a total span of more than three metres, it feels as if you have been given a glimpse into the age of the dinosaurs. Until we read the book that brought us here, I had no idea that pelicans could even be found in Greece, let alone nest on these lakes in large numbers, but then Prespa is full of surprises. In some winters, Lesser Prespa Lake can freeze solid enough to walk across – and there are far more brown bears in the region than bouzoukis. While Prespa is a popular winter destination for Greek visitors, in part because of a ski-centre halfway between Florina and the basin, it’s the quieter spring and summer seasons when the place comes into its own for walking and nature tourism.

There’s a mosaic of cultural riches to explore here too: the remarkable ruins of the 1,000-year-old Byzantine basilica on the island of Agios Achilleios; the lakeside cliffs on Great Prespa Lake, studded with centuries-old hermitages and monastic cells, reached by hiring a boatman from the fishing village of Psarades; the churches screened by sacred groves of immense juniper trees, found on some of the many marked walking trails.

Besides the abundant nature and mountain walking that prompted us to move here, what also makes this place so special is the food and hospitality. There are welcoming, family-run guesthouses in many of the villages and excellent tavernas serving regional specialities, including slow-baked beans in a rich tomato sauce with oregano, fresh carp and sardine-sized tsironia from the lake, grilled florinela cheese brushed with red pepper marmalade, and wild greens called horta doused in lemon juice and olive oil.

I stop to watch the cross-hatchings of light on the lakes as the hum of insects deepens with the heat. A short-toed eagle turns into the wind ahead of me, briefly motionless as it hunts for snakes in the forest clearings. Then it steers northwards and away across the mountains. Beyond those peaks encircling Prespa are the beautiful, traditional market towns of Korҫë in Albania and Bitola in North Macedonia, which, together with Florina and lakeside Kastoria just outside the basin in Greece, help make the entire region one of endless fascination for me.

There are plans to re-open the long-closed crossing between Greece and North Macedonia within the Prespa basin in the next few years, an opportunity to build further bridges between communities and make movement for tourists easier. Another project will establish a cross-border walking route between our village and the neighbouring mountain village of Brajčino in North Macedonia; it will celebrate the cultural and natural heritage of the common watershed while highlighting the importance of low-impact tourism to local economies, particularly at a time when climate change is making itself felt around the lakes and threatening agricultural livelihoods.

It’s almost time to return along the path and head home, but first I sit in the shade of an oak, its leaves rustling in the warm breeze. A steel-blue dragonfly unzips the air and I can hear sheep bells somewhere in the hills. The sound shifts and swirls, just as on the saint’s day festivals of summer, called panigyria, when the wild, soaring music of clarinets and raucous Balkan brass rises into the mountain nights as people gather with food and drink to circle-dance in village squares.

I’ve never thought of Prespa as anything but a shared place, where human cultures and wild species come together and co-exist, a place best experienced slowly and with care. And although Prespa has been my home for a quarter of a century now, when I see that blue water glimmering beneath me as I cross the pass, it still so often feels like the first time.

For more information visit Society for the Protection of Prespa and Visit Prespes