Tapas not tantrums: we put food at the centre of our Barcelona family holiday

On a rail trip to Spain from the UK via Paris, our writer discovers a great way of travelling happily with children …

Street lights strobed through the window, sending shadows sweeping across our faces as our train followed the River Seine through Choisy-le-Roi. Ten minutes earlier, we had pulled out of Paris’s Gare d’Austerlitz. Departing at 9.40pm, the Intercité de Nuit was due on the Spanish border just after 10am, where we would connect to a Barcelona train.

It’s possible to make the journey from London in a day, but my husband and I had added a stopover to give our two daughters – aged six and four – a whistlestop tour of the French capital, an indulgent lunch and a night on a sleeper train. Travelling with children was once a stop-start nightmare of whingeing for snacks, but instead of fighting them, I’d learned to embrace it by turning each journey into a voyage of gastronomic discovery.