Trains, Rental Cars, and Which Countries Want Which
New here? This is week five of the Graduation Trip Series - welcome.
"Shouldn't we just rent a car? It's what we'd do here."
That sentence — which I hear on discovery calls constantly — is exactly the problem. It's what you'd do HERE. How you move between places over there shapes the entire trip, and the answer isn't a preference. The country decides. Let's go through it.
The case against defaulting to the car
Over there, someone has to drive. That's supposed to be a vacation, remember? One adult spends the trip white-knuckled instead of present.
Sometimes it's the wrong side of the road. Sometimes it's road signs you've never seen. Very often it's a manual transmission you didn't ask for — automatics exist at European rental counters, but they're scarcer and pricier, and if you don't reserve one specifically, you may be learning to drive stick in an Italian parking garage.
And then there's the paperwork surprise: some countries — Italy among them — formally require US drivers to carry an International Driving Permit. It's cheap and easy to get at AAA before you leave. It is neither cheap nor easy to discover you need one at the rental counter in Rome.
The case for the train (in the right country)
In the right country, trains are a cheat code. Station in the center of town — no airport transfers, no parking garages, no circling a medieval town center that predates the concept of parking. No designated driver, so EVERYONE is on vacation.
And your teen gets a job: navigate us to platform 6. They're better at it than you. Let them win — it's Coffee Talk independence, delivered for the price of a train ticket. Nobody argues about directions on a train. That alone is worth the fare.
The honest part: trains come with homework. Right train, right car, seat assignments, where the bags go, validating tickets in the machines nobody tells tourists about. That's the stuff I handle before you leave — so you're never the family sprinting through Milano Centrale.
The list I give every family
Italy — TRAIN. The network is superb and the cities were built around the stations.
England — TRAIN. Same story. London to Bath, York, Edinburgh — the train IS the itinerary.
Croatia — CAR. The coast is the point, and the coast is a drive.
Ireland — CAR. Wrong side, narrow lanes, sheep with the right of way — and still the correct answer, because the Ireland you came for is on the roads BETWEEN the towns.
The pattern: dense countries with great rail want the train. Coastline-and-countryside countries, where the magic lives between the towns, want the car. This is not a preference thing.
(Related, and filed under "the country decides": not everywhere has a Zara, either. The shopping, the transportation, the pace — it all comes with the country you picked. More on that in a future week.)
The third option nobody tells you about: the driver
You can hire a private driver. And honestly? Sometimes it's the best money in the whole trip.
The Amalfi Coast with a private driver instead of a white-knuckle rental on cliff roads? Different vacation entirely. Airport to a Tuscan hill town with a driver who knows the road, the shortcut, and the good lunch stop? Everyone arrives happy instead of frazzled.
The honest part: it's not cheap. A private driver is a real line item — think of it as a meaningful chunk of the trip budget, not a rounding error. Which is exactly why we plan for it NOW, in the fall, as a deliberate choice — not discover it as sticker shock inside a finished itinerary. Some trips it's worth every euro. Some trips the train does the same job for a fraction. Knowing which is which is literally my job — and it's the kind of thing my on-the-ground partners price out for your actual route, not a generic estimate.
What I'd do with a teenager
Train, wherever the country allows it. A teen on a train is a happy teen: headphones in, snacks out, Tuscany rolling past the window. A teen in the back seat of a rental for four hours is a hostage — and hostages get moody by hour two.
Where the country wants a car — Croatia, Ireland — we build around it: shorter driving days, a stop that's FOR the teen, and the understanding that the drive itself is the sightseeing.
The country decides — so who picks the country?
Your family does, through the Coffee Talk. The transportation question is downstream of the destination question, which is downstream of eleven honest answers from your teen.
Drop your email below and the Coffee Talk is yours.
And if someone in your family is currently insisting they'll "just drive, how hard can it be" — send them this. Especially the part about the sheep.