Shiny and I will be coming into Europe in March of next year, specifically the 17th-24th. The only thing we have solid right now are out flights, which will be into and out of Frankfurt, Germany.

So... recommendations? I plan on spending a day or two in Frankfurt to revisit my misspent youth. After that... Belgium to see the waffle eaters? France to eat some baguettes? Holland to... uh... look at windmills? I'm thinking a few days in Ireland as well. A week is, pretty short, unfortunately, but I have no doubt it'll be expensive.

Definitely Belgium, it's a great place to visit. France... yeah not bad, not amazing, only place really you'd probably want to go is Paris but you'd need more than a couple of days there I guess, dunno, never been. Italy is supposed to be a good one to go to as well, again never been but I guess it depends what you're looking for out of your holiday (i.e. night life, historical places, walks?) I guess London should figure in there somewhere. I'd definitely spend a day or two in Germany as well seeing as that's your flight country. I love Germany, loads to do there!

Haha, awesome! Shiny told me you'd booked the flight for March on Steam yesterday already.

What's the plan hotelwise? Or will you sleep in a rental car? Since you want to visit a lot of places on a relatively short time you're gonna have to find a lot of different places to sleep clearly. I'd offer up my place for a night but it's currently a one-man apartment and basically one large room, so not exactly the kind of place I could comfortably accomodate 2 people in.

If you're in Belgium I'd obviously give you a tour of Antwerp or whatever you want to see (although I only know Antwerp really well, but having someone who actually understands most signs and names will still help in the other cities) and grab a beer and some food.

Suggestions...mm London is pretty cool but hard to get around in with a car. You'd be better off leaving it somewhere outside the city and use public transport. Paris is a great city but you risk being treated pretty shittily as a tourist (maybe even more as an American? ). Still, if you ignore that you'll find it's a great city. What about Munich? It's awesome. There are also a few smaller cities that I could mention but they're not as 'must-see' as the major ones. Well maybe I can already mention Bruges in Belgium, if you're going to go to the UK anyway you'll pass nearby there anyway. It's touristy but a gem of a city.

http://foto.brugge.be/simpleviewer/sfee ... index.html

Why would you want to visit Ireland btw? Not that I have anything against it but y'know...

With short trips, I generally prefer to have a "base" and then stay within the proximity of it. Unfortunately a week isn't ALOT of time to do 1 country justice, let alone Europe, so here's one suggestion:

A. Frankfurt
B. Black Forest (pending temperature)
C. Munich
D. Bechtesgarden
E. Salzburg
F. Vienna
G. Prague
H. Return home

For some reason Ireland holds some sort of special mystery/charm for both Shiny and I. I'm not sure I can understand it, though we both have Irish ancestry, so that may be it.

Regarding England, we're actually not planning on going there this time around. Sorry. I just don't have a huge desire to see the place. It may be that Irish influence again.

Some very real possibilities;

Amsterdam (it's really a beautiful city)
Berlin
Munich (good idea)
Paris
Rome
Venice
Dublin
Some place in Belgium (Antwerp works)

We'll be figuring out our itinerary as time permits. That's definitely a good thing about scheduling something 6 months out... plenty of time to plan it out.

@ Derf, who just posted while I was posting:
I know a week isn't long... it's too bad. But I don't know if I can afford to do this again for quite awhile, so that's why we're trying to hit the high points. Good call on Vienna though... I wouldn't mind going back there again.

I think you'll find Ireland is mostly peasants with weird accents drinking themselves to death and fighting amongst themselves the countryside is pretty sweet though.

I wouldn't recommend England apart from London, but then I don't know it nearly as well as some of the Brits here of course.

The funny thing is that you bitches probably have a different appreciation of the distances. I mean you gotta drive like 2 hours to get to the grocery store (slight exaggeration). You could drive from Brussels to Paris in 3 hours for example. London and Amsterdam are even closer.

Even so, i think it might be optimistic to do Rome-Venice-Munich, Paris-Antwerp-Amsterdam AND go to Dublin in one week. (I clustered together the ones that can be done in a straight-ish line). Dublin in particular is tough, given the boat ride/plane trip.

We realize that we will probably not be able to go to all of the places we would like to go on this trip -right now we are trying to think of our top places and see how well we can put together a plan of attack. Obviously traveling for a few hours does not seem very daunting to us as we drive for many hours to get to some of our favorite places here. But we would love suggestions including any places you people might be willing to go to meet up with us. Cause I think we would love to buy you guys a beer or so hehe.

Yea, Shiny's absolutely right. There's no way we're going to visit all those places.. we're just brainstorming all the places we would like to go. Once we've got that, we'll figure out what makes the most sense to do this trip. I expect we'll only visit maybe 3 or 4 places total. Ultimately, this is a vacation, and I want to enjoy myself... not get stressed out hauling butt from place to place just to see as much as possible in as small a time as possible.

ok.. we've done solidifying. We need help with 1 final destination.

We are going to...

Frankfurt
Antwerp
Paris

We want to go one more place, but are somewhat torn as to where. Any suggestions? We were thinking Luxembourg, Zurich, or
Amsterdam. Luxembourg and Zurich would be after Paris and bring us in most of a circle back to Frankfurt for our flight out. Amsterdam just sounds nice.

We eliminated Italy because of the distance, and we definitely wanted to see Ox, so Belgium was a no-brainer. Since we were heading west from Frankfurt anyway, it made sense to go to Paris after... I've been already, but wouldn't mind seeing the Louvre and checking out the night life. Shiny's never been and at least wants to see the Eiffel tower and the Louvre. Anyway, right now we're trying to figure out our 4th destination city, then we're going to plan out exactly what we're doing and where we're staying.

ok, we're planning on doing eurorail, so I think Zurich is out of the running. 'Benelux' is one country as far as eurorail is concerned, so that would mean we could do a 3 country pass to include Germany, France, and 'Benelux', which is Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. You euros probably already knew this, but it's all new to me. So, that leaves it up to Amsterdam or Luxembourg. Or maybe some other place we hadn't thought of.

FYI, we're planning on doing future trips to Europe to cover 'the rest'. We're thinking a trip to Ireland/England, and a trip to Austria/Italy/Croatia/Hungary areas. Now I just need to find that job so I can actually afford it.

No idea if Luxembourg is worth visiting, never been there, and haven't really heard of anyone visiting it. Probably isn't that touristic i guess. But i really can't think of anyone i remotely know going on vacation/city trip to luxembourg.

Amsterdam is nice of course, lots of different things to see/to do.

Don't expect too much from the weather at the end of march either (but i guess you knew that).

Same as J really, never heard a huge amount about Luxembourg but apparently Amsterdam is a really nice place to visit, and not just for the usual things you hear about it! So I'd probably say go for Amsterdam.

Yea, sounds good. I've been to Amsterdam (twice), so I know of all that it has to offer... awesome architecture, wooden shoes, wind mills, tulips... you know.

Yeah, don't go to Luxembourg, it's not worth it. It's a mini state with a good tax climate for the well-off, with beautiful nature areas but nothing you can't see in the US. The capital (Luxembourg city ) is a pretty enough city but too quiet for a visit, especially given the relatively short time you'll be staying here. Also, expensive to stay.

Eurail is a good idea and should cut down quite a bit on gast and car rental costs. Try to take 1st class passes if they aren't THAT much more expensive than the regular ones. You should generally speaking be fine in 2nd class as long as you don't travel the peak commuting hours as it tends to be really ok in terms of comfort in North and Western Europe. If you'd go to Italy, Spain, Greece or other Southern countries like that I wouldn't advise you to travel second class though.

There are plenty of regular-service international intercity trains that you should be able to board without any real sort of supplement on your eurail pass. I myself travel almost daily on the Brussels-Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam intercity train (although I only do the Brussels-Antwerp part).

But you may want to consider the Thalys trains to save time. They travel on the line Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam which includes Antwerp too. They cost a little extra on the Eurail pass apparently (http://www.eurail.com/eurail-high-speed-thalys) but you can take 2nd class with them no worries since they are pretty sweet trains comfort-wise. This is more or less what second class looks like



But what's better is the travel time:

Paris - Amsterdam: 3.20 hours
Paris - Antwerp 2 hours

Apparently you even have internet on them:

All Thalys trains offer Wi-fi internet. The service is free for first class passengers. Passengers in second class pay €6.50 (US$10) for an hour of Wi-fi connection or €13 (US$20) for the entire trip.

Might be a good way to pass the journey.


As for Hungary-Austria-Croatia-Italy(-Prague?) etc plan...that should be a lot cheaper than traveling Western Europe. So you may not have to be a millionaire before getting there!

Looks like i'm gonna have to get my butt down to Antwerp for a few drinks