Fall in Europe

Octoberfest

Don't be fooled by the name. In 2019 it starts on September 21 :-)

https://www.oktoberfest.de/en

Munich in Sept has the hotel rates are jacked up, you'll see it's a marked increase from what double normally costs. When I am in Munich, usually almost every trip, either to relax or stay one or two nights, I stay in a Pension near the central station...numerous 2 star hotels in that area.

I think you're trying to cover an awful lot of ground in too few days. Prague, Budapest and Vienna would each be at least 4 days for me, and that doesn't really cover transportation time to get there. It would be a shame to travel all the way to Auschwitz and not see Krakow, which isn't a 1-day destination, either.

Please give very serious considerarion to either extending this trip substantially or splitting your target list across two trips.

Renting and dropping off a car in two different countries usually yields an extremely high surcharge. Some rental-car companies do not allow their cars to be taken across the border into certain of the former Iron Curtain countries, so you'll need to check on that as well.

To manage your expectations and planning I suggest you break your daily schedule down into AM, PM and Evening activities, and block out what you want to do/see, and your travel needs/time commitments. RS did this on one of his travel skills shows, making his list first and then paring it down to fit the time available. You already have ten or eleven places to go that you have mentioned, with at least a half days travel separating each one even if you do them in as close to a linear geographic order as you can. Posters on this forum commonly recommend at least three nights in any one featured spot to give you two full days (three nights) on the ground, and after many trips I completely agree. Plot your objectives on a map and make a list of the available travel options/times. That will help you pare down some of the objectives. Rothenburg and Neuschwanstein for example are not really on the way to anywhere else. Prague, Krakow/Auschwitz, and Budapest are also travel outliers in terms of the time it takes to get there from other places.

Great time of the year to travel in Europe, you will have a great time, and you will be back for more bites if you enjoy this time by pacing yourselves.

You've gotten some great advice. I totally agree with Nick.

In addition to his suggestions, I suggest you triage all the things you want to do, then build your trip around that, based on staying a minimum of 3 nights (2 days) at each. Also be realistic about travel from one place to the other. You say you want to rent a car so you can explore the small towns. If that is the case, expect to take the entire day moving from one place to the next.

I'd also start investigating cost and availability of accommodations. As it was pointed out, there are many festivals when you plan to travel which will make rooms pricy and hard to come by.

This made me think of a young couple who ran a charming B&B in the wilds of the Isle of Skye in Scotland. They had instituted a two night minimum policy, mainly because of the attitude of the one nighters. They said those who just stop for the night were always in a hurry and in a bad mood from being run ragged.

My wife and I started traveling together when we were on a school trip to Europe in 1966. We done all sorts of traveling, from organized tours to river cruises to independent travel. We sit right between your ages. We also have gotten to the point that we spend a minimum of 5 DAYS at each location. We may take some side trips, but mostly we've just slowed down to appreciate the ambience of the area. It is far more satisfying than trying to cram everything into a hurried trip where you spend as much time getting from here to there than you actually spend "there".

There's just no way you can do all of that in 2 weeks. Either you do Bavaria/Austria/Hungary or Germany/Czech Republic/Poland, and either of those is going to be a lot. Likewise, you should plan to start and end in different cities, as you're not going to have time to "make a circuit". And you're really not going to have time to stop in all the small towns and take them in, just not going to happen. So, either you seriously revise what your plans are, or expect to be very disappointed.

September in Bavaria is going to be expensive. That's prime tourist time for everyone, including the locals.

My suggestion is you figure out what three things you absolutely need to see, and then plan around them. You could easy spend two weeks just flying into Munich and driving around Bavaria. Just doing Rothenberg odT, Neuschwanstein, Berchtesgarten, Eagles Nest, and one other walled city (Dinklesbuhl or Nordlingen?) is a week if you rush it, and that's not counting time in Munich.

If you decided to do Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna you could easily do that by train, and that's two weeks if you really want to see the towns. Likewise Prague and Budapest; it's not hard to get there by train, but these are not one to two day destinations.

You need to decide what type of travelers you are. Some like a sampling, whereas others like to linger in a place for a while.
However, for planning:
- rule of thumb is for every city move, it eats up about half a day. Therefore you are losing 4-5 days with your current plan just getting between places
- Compare flight costs. You may find an 'open jaw' or 'multi city' ticket of flying into one city and out another is affordable. It saves time, for sure, and may be cost effective in not requiring the expenses to return to City A. However, there can be great return seat sales making that recommendation moot
- Rome2rio website is a good site for making broad first passes at logistics and travel sequences. It can help you decide what mode of transport to use. However, bare in mind it doesn't necessarily take into consideration seasonal schedules and pricing, so for the fine details, visit the transport website
- I don't understand why you can't take a regional train or bus to small Bavarian towns? (see point above)
- if you decide to drive, often there is no 'one way' drop fees if you return a car in the same country
- If you, at 74, are going to be principal driver, you want to check what auto insurance costs provide the adequate CDW for Europe. Often our personal auto or credit card coverage isn't applicable for international rentals....and some have cost levels dependent on age

• If you, at 74, are going to be principal driver, you want to check what auto insurance costs provide the adequate CDW for Europe. Often our personal auto or credit card coverage isn't applicable for international rentals....and some have cost levels dependent on age

Maria raises an excellent and often overlooked point. Before we rented a car in May for France, I called up my State Farm agent to check. It turns out we have no coverage for driving in Europe with our policies. Since I'm a Hertz Gold member, I opted for the comprehensive coverage they offered.

I am not sure whether this stipulation still applies to rental cars from Germany as they did in the mid to late 1990s, (yes, 2 decades ago), which had in writing in the rental car contract (Mietvertag) that the car could not be taken into Poland for the obvious reasons.

Check on that if it's still true.

If you are looking at one-way fares to arrival city and one-way fares from departure city and adding them together to compare with round-trip fares, yes you will likely see a big difference.

The better way is what we used to call open-jaw but is now often called "multi-city" by the airlines. In most cases that is quite competitive with a round-trip fare. They are used to it - lots of people do it.

Agree by the way - please edit your original post and remove your personal email. It is very easy here to use the PM Personal Message facility. If you checked the box in your profile you will get an email anytime a PM is sent to you and every time somebody replies to this thread.

Leaving your personal email up makes you a target for all sorts of things. If you look around here, nobody does it.

I would look at an open jaw tickets. Nearly all of our trips are open jaw -- into one and home from another. It is rare for us to find that this is more expensive than a RT ticket. And never more expensive when you factor in the cost in both money and time to return to the RT city. I am sure there are exceptions if you use odd or small airports. Second, you do not want to rent a car in one country and drop in another. The drop fee will be substantial.

So you visited the Mauthausen concentration camp site more than 30 years ago, and we spent part of a day there in April 1999, just over 20 years ago. Not certain how things have changed since then, but we’d been in Vienna for several days, and were taking trains west, eventually to Glarus, Switzerland. Stopping and getting off at the St. Valentin train station outside Mauthausen, we shuttled to the camp by taxi. I’ve not been to any other Nazi concentration camps, but Mauthausen was very sobering. I still frequently recall the one barracks building they had left standing back then, plus the building with the gas chamber camouflaged as a group shower, the supposed vision exam device that was really a way to shoot someone in the eye, the crematorium chimney, and the tiny cube that showed the amount of food the Nazi scientists had determined was the “ideal” daily nutritional ration for prisoners to be fed. I imagine the audioguides now are more technologically advanced than the rudimentary players they had 20 years ago, and maybe there are even guided tours. If you’re up for a bit of a walk and a climb, I also recall descending into the rock quarry where so many prisoners perished, passing bouquet after bouquet of memorial flowers. The climb walk back out of the quarry took some effort, but it provided some more time to reflect on the terrible things that had happened there. If you’re looking for more current specifics, sorry that I can’t provide them, but I just wanted to say how meaningful that visit to Mauthausen would likely be, even if you’d been there in the past.

Later on that same trip, we returned to Austria and rented bicycles, and rode part of the bike path along the Danube. Back then, you could rent from Austrian train stations, and simply return them at another station, but I understand that’s no longer offered. We ended in Ybbs, Austria, and caught a train to Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, then on to Cesky Budejovice and eventually to Prague. The fast Austrian train crossed the border, and the engine was disconnected. A Czech engine was connected, and the train was much, much slower from that point onwards. Again, the train systems may have changed a lot in the past 20 years, so may be faster all around - or maybe not! A day and night (or 2) in Cesky Krumlov would be worth it, if it’s on your way between Vienna or Salzburg and Prague.

It sounds as if Cyn saw Cesky Krumlov becre it became seriously overrun. I haven't been there yet, but I gather the town now gets blitzed with bus tours. My intention is to arrive mid- to late-afternoon, spend the night and depart before lunchtime the next day.

The Cesky Krumlov town was neat back several years ago, so it’s undersrandae that it would be popular. There’s a reason people visit — hopefully not so many, though, that it would start to keep others away.

RE: audio guides. Twenty years ago I don't recall the museums I went to in Germany and Austria offered audio guides, not that i ever used one, or would use one today, but I was not offered one in a history museum.

Mauthausen had free audioguides with headphones, and they added context to the remaining structures and artifacts at the site.