Europe this Summer

Have they tried ginger root, scopolamine or another motion sickness remedy?

I get motion sickness on buses but am OK if I can see out of the front of the bus. So I try to sit in an isle seat near the front. I am OK on trains. If your family is good on trains then it is easy to get around many parts of Europe by rail.

Why not pick a city, such as Rome or Paris and base yourselves there vs a bus tour? I have very mild motion sickness and can NOT do more than 1 hour on most busses. A Rick Steves bus tour would be miserable for me.

It would be pretty hard to find a tour company that doesn't use buses to get from place to place. If a tour is what you want, then I'd recommend discussing motion sickness preventatives with your family health provider.

Or consider going independent and using trains when you change locations, keeping the number of changes to a minimum.

Dramamine is my best friend unless the road is very straight. I’ve been on 2 RS tours and am doing a 3rd in June. Wrist bands with pressure points helped a lot this year, so give them a try.

This is precisely why we haven’t taken a tour. We drive so we can go at our own pace, stop when we need, etc. We spent 3 weeks driving through Germany, Austria, Slovenia & Italy. Most days we drove less than 4 hrs between destinations. You’ll spend a lot more time on the road on a tour, and it will cost ALOT more than doing it independently. You could also look into traveling by train, but make sure to do a test trip to know if trains cause motion sickness (they do for me).

If I climb elevation on a bus motion sickness sets in so I started wearing sea bands on each wrist and have had no trouble since. You can also talk to your physician and see what he or she recommends.

Those intensive guided tours to Europe will often result in long days on buses. I'd hate to be a teenager cooped up on a bus and just hitting the highlights of Europe between England and Italy. And it might be torture for those with car sickness.

You don't say how long your trip will be. We like to go two weeks and three weekends and take in three big cities. We often will stay out in the countryside at a AirBnB or farm stay and take day trips into the big cities.

We like to visit cities that are relatively close to each other--cities that complement each other. I'm talking about Munich, Salzburg and Vienna. Or Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Or London, Paris and Barcelona. Or London, Brussels and Amsterdam. The most popular is probably Rome, Florence and Venice. Some of our greatest times have been spent in Munich and touring Southern Bavaria and the Tirol region of Austria and Salzburg.

There have been a few people prone to motion sickness in every tour I have been on. They all managed any issues successfully through a combination of sitting strategically on the bus in a location with less sway, wrist bands or meds such as Bonine.

Don’t think that RS tours are nonstop bus experiences. Many of those making those types of statements above have actually never gone on a tour.

You can get a sense about the bus by looking at the detailed itinerary for any tour. Each day will include an estimate of the time on the bus that day as well as anticipated walking.

Agree that you should maybe just go to one or two places for a base. You can always take a train to get from one to the other. Or do they get motion sickness even on trains?

For a first time to Europe, maybe start with England since they speak English (although English is a common language just about anywhere). Distances aren't far.

Get your kids involved in the planning. Buy some maps and guidebooks and have them choose some things they'd like to do.

I get motion sickness very easily and usually have trouble on guided tours. The usual seating policy is a daily rotation so that everyone moves through the bus front to back. On the RS Alpine tour, there were 4 of us sufferers and the rest of the group were very kind and allowed us the generally coveted front seats for the entire tour. That was especially generous since most "bus days" meant 5-8 hours on the bus. On other tours (RS and non-RS) people have not always been so considerate - understandably because everyone deserves to have the "best" seats at least once.

How severely are they affected? The bus stops about every 2 hours, with 15 minute mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks and a longer one, around 30 minutes, for lunch. Is that enough? I take domperidone (not available in the US) to combat the nausea and it works for me and doesn't make me drowsy, like dramamine does.

The Best of Europe tours look like they have lots of bus time, so they may not be suitable. Definitely look at other tours. Every itinerary includes a travel time estimate (bus, train, boat) for each day. Are you thinking about a 2 or 3 week tour? Consider combining 2 shorter tours with a flight or train between them. . . . like Paris and Heart of Belgium and Holland.

With teenagers, I'd definitely do one or two cities with day trips. They are young and still have time to see all of Europe. Are they taking a foreign language at school? Are they interested in certain countries-I loved Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie as a child so naturally the first place I went in Europe was London.

As a teen, a RS tour of Europe probably would have felt more like National Lampoons European Vacation to me. I would involve the kids in learning where they want to go and then building a travel itinerary from there.