re: Europe travel- Car or train/plane

Take the planes/trains from city to city. The high speed trains run almost 200 MPH so you'll get there 3x as fast and not have to deal with parking.

I'm renting a car for the first time in Europe this July and only because we're going to/from Rome to Tuscany and have a house out in the country.

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and maybe I said this in your other thread. You are coming to the USA for 25 days and you are flying into NYC, going to Boston, traveling to Atlanta, then Miami, then going to Chicago.

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I nearly just threw up on myself. With kids, it's coming out the other end too. Not my kids, because they're angelic, but you get the idea.

You did a fantastic job of putting things into perspective for OP (and for me, I instantly defaulted to what kind of train to take).

There is too much to do in nearly any one place OP has mentioned than to bother with packing more cities in for dubious purpose other than box checking.

You'll do what you want to do, but so much of Europe is lazily "figuring out where you want to go." Spend a few extra days here, spend a day in an Irish pub talking to the Irish, sitting in a cafe in Paris or Brussels and watching life happen, etc.

Suggestion: wherever you're planning on going, if you can get tickets to an EPL or Champions League match, just say yes. Anfield at least can embarrass the SEC. But the beer sucks.

Since Baldona has indicated that you've started a few threads on this, this clearly obligates you to be honest and you must post some form of trip report.

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Respectfully, you don’t know that if you have never done a rental.

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Fair point, and poor phrasing on my part…I’ve also made sure the places we were going would work most ideally with trains, I guess that was partly my point as well.

To be fair to all sides and maybe this is why I'm partial to cars OP, but here's my first trip to Europe when I was in college. My parents planned it basically at the beginning of internet days and prior to booking hotels and what not online. I remember my dad calling the BnB lady on the phone.

My dad got some great deals on Lufthansa so that explains part of his poor planning, but I still laugh trying to figure it out.

1.) Lufthansa to Munich, flight transfer to Paris.
2.) 4 days Paris
3.) Pick up rental car, drive to Munich
4.) 4 days Munich and Bavaria
5.) Drive to Belgium to stay with friends for 2 nights.
6.) Drive/ boat to Central England 4 days
7.) Drive back to Paris. Fly out transfer to Munich, fly home

Trip was awesome. I don't have any bad memories. 5 deep in a station wagon I was college age and my sisters were HS age.

In hindsight, why we didn't just fly into Munich, rent a car to see Bavaria, train everywhere else, then fly out of London to Munich and home? IDK.

There are different train companies in each nation, and ones that go between them.

Every company has one, or more, high speed train operators. There are some special trains that run between countries though (Thalys, Eurostar, etc.).

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Amsterdam>Munich>Lausanne>Barcelona>Pamplona>Paris spending 3-5 days in each.

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Thoughts?

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You've turned a vacation into a business trip.

Your desired destinations are three clusters of two cities each.

Amsterdam/Paris
Pamplona/Barca
Lausanne/Munich

If someone gave me a trip but told me I had to visit those cities in some order in 25 days, I’d fly into the first city of each cluster, rent a car one way to the second city of each cluster and fly on to the next cluster until done.

Probably in the order I listed above.

Europe by car is (relatively) expensive and there are some complexities to doing it correctly and legally. Plus, the sum total of your chosen cities are not located conveniently to each other.

Here’s a spatial comparison (below), you’ll be traveling a good percentage of your total available time to hit so many diverse destinations.



Pamplona to Munich is (distance-wise) like Las Vegas to Denver except there’s a bunch more interesting stuff in between the two places in Europe.

Good luck, you’ll note I resisted the strong urge to offer what I’d do with 25 days in Europe.

Omitting your Swiss Adventure

Flight into AMS
Pick up rental car
Amsterdam
Rental car to Paris
Paris
Drop rental car in Paris
Paris train to Munich (5+ hours)
Rental car in Munich
Munich
Return Rental Car in Munich
Munich flight to Barcelona
Pick up rental car in Barcelona
Barcelona
Rental car to Pamplona
Pamplona
Drop rental car in Pamplona
Pamplona train to either Barcelona or Madrid for return flight home

Mercy, that’s still a bunch of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

I’d probably land at AMS and just run the wheels off a single rental car for the duration of my visit. Turn it in in Barcelona with 2,000 more miles on it.

Nice photos.

You were in Paris on April 15, 2019 when Notre Dame was on fire?
So was I. We witnessed it right from the beginning and I made a thread about it on this board that night.

Then we did the same thing you did, rented a car and drove to Normandy, basing in Bayeux.

It is in my topic history.

I have photos but didn’t post any.