European trip to germany france and ending in amsterdam

Since you'll have a car once you get to Mulhouse, you can overnight in small towns or even villages outside of the large cities, where it will probably be cheaper and easier to get a room and less of a problem to find a parking space. Plus, I think it would be more fun to be flexible. The time frame sounds doable. A lot of German cities will send you info via airmail if you go to their websites and fill out a request form. It usually comes in more than one language.

Deborah, I think you have allowed a good amount of time for this route, there are so many posters that would come on here, list 7 or 8 places,, then tell us they have 10 days to do them in! I am not sure what you mean by "eurorail system" I hope you don't mean a train pass, they are rarely a good spend, point to point tickets bought in advance tend to be much, much cheaper. That does however mean settting some time frame when training, but you will have more freedom on the car portions. One thng about having a car is you can always find a room, just by driving around.. much easier then hauling suitcases and walking .

Hope you are using good guide books. There is no such thing as the eurorail system. Eurorail and Rail Europe are travel agencies or resellers of train tickets and not rail companies. Each country has it only national rail system. The best prices and options will always be through the national rail site. The German rail site, bahn.de, lists all of the schedules for European trains but you can only buy tickets on the German site for train travel that starts or ends in Germany. You may encounter expensive drop charges for returning the car in Amsterdam.

Thanks everyone for you quick feed back, very helpful.
When I said eurorail I was just speaking of train travel, however I think that with our schedule we should just rent a car. any thoughts on this? Price of fuel, renting an auto in advance? I also think that we will have more freedom and luck finding places to stay with an auto. Should we bring our own GPS?

I can think of few ideas worse than having a car in Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam.

First, rail travel in Europe is on a network of national rail systems, each one (German Rail, French Rail, Belgian Rail, etc) run by that country. Eurail runs no trains; it is a joint effort of the national rail companies to package and market railpasses. Second, Germany Rail, along with Swiss Rail, has the densest network of rail lines in Europe. Virtually everywhere in Gemany is accessible by rail for a lot less than money and hassle than renting a car. Take the train from Berlin to Dresden and on to Strasbourg. You might have to use a car in France, which has a much less dense network. Ditch the car before Benelux.

Had a car in Belgium once. Never again.

This is certainly feasible, but I think you should check the cost of that rental. Renters standardly charge stiff fees to drop off in a country different from pickup.

Yes, go to some car rental sites and plug in your dates to see how much the rental will run and then add in the insurance- Zowee, the CDW is costly!The rental may seem reasonable till you add in the drop off and the insurance. Still, if that is how you like to travel, it's your vacation. I paid 150 euros drop off fee for pick up in Brussels/drop off in Amsterdam in Aug 2011. Some people here like leasing cars instead of renting. Gasoline is up around nine dollars a gallon, and parking will be expensive in the cities. However, as a previous poster noted, you can stay in the suburbs or small towns and save money on hotels with a car- it might work out even, depending on what level of hotel you prefer.
Use viamichelin.com for some good estimates of your travel times and tolls- and add 25% to the time for realism. Have a good trip!

One more thought: You can leave your car on the outskirts of larger cities and take public transportation in....

Thank you to everyone for all of your advise, it has been extremely helpful. Went to the book store this evening and picked up one of rick steve's books on germany. The main reason for the trip was to go to Mulhouse and Belfort France to do some ancestory searching on my husbands grandparents. Some how what was suppose to be a 2 wk. searching trip has turned into a 27 day adventure. Again thanks for all the great advise!