Family of 4 first Europe trip

Hi Shane. The most valuable advice I can give is for you to get on over to your local bookstore and buy Rick Steves book Europe Thru the Back Door, then read it cover to cover. It contains just the info you need. Then after reading that if you have specific quesitons, come back and ask specifics. Enjoy your planning and your trip!

Shane, do not buy any rail passes yet, they are often NOT the deal, plus you need seperate ones now, there is no one rail pass you can use in france and Italy and UK. You can purchase Eurostar tickets online 120 days in advance for best prices, they can be quite cheap. You can buy idTGV tickets to Nice online in advance ( can't recall if its 90 or 120 days ) and they can be very cheap( I paid 40 euros for first class tickets last july, they were even cheaper in second, ( which is fine) .The ride is about 5.5 hours but its very pleasant( bring your own picnic lunch food is not great on board, and they only do like prepack sandwichs etc for like 10-12 euros, you can make nice ones yourself or buy some for 5 euros from a bakery!) You can also fly really cheap on Easyjet or Vueling, I used both last summer, from Barcelona to Paris would have been 9 hours or more on the trian and about 70 euros each, I paid 97 euros for two of us, ( all in taxes and checked luggage fees) and it was 1 hr 50 minutes so even adding time to comute from airports we saved time and money) . Take the time to map out your route and look at ticket prices point to point before you jump at any rail pass. Also note on some routes , even with railpasses you have to reserve and pay an extra fee.

What a great trip! You have so many choices that I think the advice about guidebooks is really the best overall. (I'd look beyond Rick Steves, though I would certainly start with his ETBD.) I would like to respond to a few of your preliminary ideas. You probably would NOT "enjoy taking in as many countries as possible." That would be too much on the train, not enough on the ground. What you need to figure out is the optimal balance of destinations for you and your family. That will need an iterative planning process with maps and guidebooks while you explore your options. Your kids are old enough to participate too. In 4 weeks, you can see a lot. A trip like that lets you vary the pace in creative ways. A week of fast-paced 2-night stands can precede a week of day trips from a single destinations. You have targeted the great cities, but especially in the summer, make sure you get out into the countryside. Varying the texture of your trip creates contrast that makes for vivid memories. London is a good place to start your trip. Paris is logistically an easy next step, a quick train ride away. From there you could fly to Rome and spend the rest of your trip in Italy and not be bored. Or you could explore another part of France first, or head north to Amsterdam, or spend perhaps 3 days in the Alps, before going to Italy and ultimately flying home from there. Just don't try to cram in too much! Have a marvelous adventure.

Shane, you may realize this, but if not, this is important. Rome will be hot, cruelly hot.. having been 3 times in summer its always been between 90-100 degrees for me.. and I think thats about normal. If you do nothing at all, make sure you get a/c in Rome, it would be good in Paris too( London, 4 times in summer , always had rain, but they do get some heatwaves, but there I would risk not getting it if it meant saving those $$ for a/c in Paris and Rome). Also I agree with you, ,some beach time with kids is a great idea, lots of churches and museums are great, but at some point in the holiday two days or so of just going to the beach and decompressing is a good idea.

Don't focus on visiting as many countries as possible; instead think about quality time, not quantity. Switzerland lies between France (Paris) and Italy, and your kids will both travel on the trains, boats, etc. for free if you get a Family Card with any kind of Swiss pass or card. You could travel Paris-Basel-Alps (fun stuff fo rkids)-Lake Geneva (castle, beaches)-Milan-Ligurian coast (beaches)-(maybe Pisa, Florence, etc.) -Rome. Not necessarily suggesting you spend time in Milan but the route goes that way. You could say at one of the towns on the Lake Maggiore (Stresa) if you want or continue from Milan to lake Como (Varenna) in an hour past Milan. Yes it will be hot in Rome and in Florence & Pisa too if you go there. But we've been at least to florence in August and it was tolerable. AC is highly desireable.

Hi Shane, I have just finished planning and booking a trip for 3 weeks in Europe for our family of 4. I started a wee bit earlier, and we found it quite a challenge to narrow down where we wanted to go and to see. The options are so vast. After reading through RS through the back door, we decided that instead of trying to do it ALL, we picked 3-4 locations and extended our stays in the those areas. Less travel time involved as well, and renting apartments for all but one location, gave us the option to save a bit of money on meals, and have place to spread out and relax. My kids are a bit younger, 10 and 12, but we are also outdoorsy. To give you an idea of our original plan, it was Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy and fly out of Spain. We decided to take the top three that we most wanted to see. Save the rest for our next trip! Our narrowed down itinerary for 22 days is; fly into Glasgow, over to Edinburgh for a couple nights, train to Paris France (1 week), overnight train to Venice for 2 nights, train to Rome(1 week). Fly out of Rome. All in the month of July. We are pre-booking all our train travel as far out as allowed, to save on the cost. Apartments are all booked with deposits. We compared budget flying within Europe, over taking the train, and the price was relatively the same for us, but we figured that by train, there would be less time waiting in an airport and my one daughter is a train lover, so that was a win-win for us. Also getting a glimpse of the country as well is an added bonus. 'Con't

con't Good luck on your planning. I wouldn't wait too long to start deciding your itinerary. I found that some of the good apartments get booked early if that is the way you want to go. Also with the train, Eurostar is 90 days out for booking, and thello (overnight) is 120 days out. You get the best deals if you can book as soon as your dates are available. Flying openjaw is a great option as well. If you have any questions please feel free to PM me. I am no expert by far, and you will find a lot of great info on this forum as well as the Graffiti wall. There are so many helpful travellers here with great advice. A lot of my questions have been answered by many on the RS helpline!

Hi Shane, All good advice here and I agree, do the math first before buying the Eurail Passes. Advance purchase rail Paris to Nice or Avignon is 25 Euro/each. One possible itinerary would look something like this: 6 nights London 5 nights Paris (with side trip too Versailles) 4 nights Provence (train to Arles, rent car for 3 days) 3 nights Nice (beach time here) 2 nights Riomaggiore (Cinque Terre) 3 nights Florence 5 nights Rome These locations are all easy to reach via rail and give you a nice mixture of Big City/Quiet Village. My daughter and I did something similar as part of a 7 week trip when she was 16. As a bonus for your son, check out Les Baux in Provence. And you will all enjoy renting a canoe at Pont du Gard for some additional water time.
Have fun planning and enjoy the adventure!

Shane,
Another suggestion regarding guide books. When my daughter and I were planning our trip, we found the DK Eyewitness Travel Guides to be more her style. She is very busy with her school activities and most guide books require extensive reading. You should be able to borrow them from your library. The DK books have wonderful pictures and brief descriptions that make it much easier for kids to decide what interests them most. In fact, we purchased a couple of the DK Top 10 books to take with us.

Thank you all for the wonderful advice. My wife and kids are very excited about the trip. We have started a folder with all the places we want to visit. It of course is way more than we can do. We all agree we need to narrow it down.
Again thank you very much for all the advice. I will defiantly check out the travel book and some others.

Another useful resource is Cythia Harriman's Take Your Kids to Europe. I think she's the one who introduced my family to the concept of "Days to Choose". When it is your day to choose you choose everything (within reason) - meals, sights to see, whatever decisions need to be made. We try to give everyone roughly the same number of days, but not necessarily in a strict rotation so that if you want two days to choose in Rome you might not get one in London. Those who like to plan may make suggestions if you have one family member who doesn't like to make plans. We've used this method for fifteen years, whenever there's a trip of at least a week in length. The boys are in their 20's now and still like traveling with us! It can be wonderfully freeing not to be in charge all the time, and you see interesting quirky things. Feel free to adapt the idea to suit your family.

Let me preface by saying when I travel, I focus on one geographic area and make all the travel legs logical and short. Time spent in transit is basically wasted time for me, so I minimize it and always avoid backtracking. If I were planning a trip that included London, Paris and Rome. I'd focus on cheap flights between the major cities. There are a number of carriers to look at and sites that will scan fares and schedules for you. I normally start with Kayak for my international flight and work from there. Others who take hops around Europe can tell you more, I just don't do the longer legs that require flights. Make sure you allow plenty of time to see each city (or anywhere really) you visit. My rule of thumb is two major sights per day (one in the morning and one in the afternoon). Use guidebooks, or websites, to list all the sight possibilities; pick the ones you most want to see, then divide by two and that's how many days to stay. I also keep a list of less "must see" sights in case I find myself with extra time (didn't stay at one sight as long as planned or turned out it was closed the day I visited).

FYI; school break for Europeans is generally (with plenty of variation from place to place) mid-July to late August - exactly when you plan to go. At this time of year, many accommodations are full with EU tourists and prices are quite high to reflect demand. All of our family trips to Europe have started early June and ended by July 20th or so to avoid the worst of the rush. It seems to work well for us, plus you might avoid the worst of the heat that way, too.

Don't leave Europe without going to at least one castle. Happy travels!

On the other hand, my neices who live in Germany get from the end of june to the end of the first week in august off.. they get more time off in October to make up for what we consider a short summer break.

My family of four had a 5 week trip to Europe in 2008 when our girls were 13+14 and we found Ricks ETBD worth every penny. I also found Cythia Harriman's Take Your Kids to Europe really helpful. Our plan was to have our girls experience all kinds of travel during our trip so that Hopefully, One Day the two of them would travel together. They are planning a Sisters Trip for 2014 (yeah) We each had a Rick Steves convertible backpack and each were responsible for carrying our own stuff. (kids pack much lighter when they are carrying it themselves) We had them each research where they wanted to go and why and made sure that we tried to accomodate their wish list.(there are great childrens books that take place in Eurpean cities, ask a librarian, its a great way to get them excited) We started in Holland and stayed in 4 different hostels in 4 different towns-Amsterdam (Visited the Rijksmuseum and Rembrant House) , Haarlem (beautiful town) and Heemskerk(where we stayed in a Castle, Loved it) and Appledoorn where we rented bicycles)travelling by train and bus.Hostels in Holland are amazing and the breakfasts are huge. We felt very safe at all times. All through the trip, we each carried water bottles and bought fruit, bread and ham for lunches on the road.
We then travelled to France where we were lucky to stay with a relative in Paris for a few days.We had purchased Museum passes (which were perfect) and knowing the quick way into the Louvre without waiting with the hoards was a real time saver.

....continued... From Paris we took the Overnight sleeper train (great experience, great way to cover alot of territory)south where we had rented a house in a village in the Dordogne countryside (Aillac, France) There, we bussed to neighbouring towns to grocery shop, borrowed bikes from a "neighbour" and hit the country side for an afternoon, canoed down the Dordogne river and enjoyed a few days of beach along the Dordogne. We visited the caves at Lesscaux (ancient cave paintings) and then hit the road again by train to Carcasonne. From there we headed to Nice for a day showing the girls where we had stayed for 3 weeks years and years ago. Next it was on to Italy, where we visited Cinque Terre and then on to La Serra where we had rented a small flat for a few days. We bussed and walked and trained and discovered our own little heaven in lots of out of the way places. One item I would highly recommend bringing is an ipod. We had about 10 episodes of Corner Gas (a canadian comedy show) on an Ipod and we took turns sharing headphones and watching re-runs while waiting for trains, planes and automobiles. We found our daughters grew very confident during our trip becoming comfortable enough to order a meal in French, buy bread and ham in Italy and figure out train schedules and bus routes. Our youngest figured out the Paris metro in no time and the oldest took on the responsibility of keeping us on budget. We did get that Extra Gelato when we wanted it, but she would remind us we would have no extra "treats" for on the next train ride.
If you have any questions, I would be happy to help. I really feel that trip brought us really close as a family, and having the memories to talk about keeps us close.

That's great that you have so much time to take! I am in the middle of planning my family of four's trip, and unfortunately we are having to jam pack things in! Hubby and my DS, 15, can only stay for 2 weeks because of work and sports, so we're sending them away and my daughter, mom, neice and I are staying longer! After looking and looking, I realized that a great way to see Italy, Spain, and the south of France is actually a Med cruise. We are travelling on a Spanish cruise line (Pullmantur), so that will be culturally different and less-American, and we have a junior suite for $499 a person for 7 days - and kids under 17 are free except port charges. So we couldn't pass it up. Yes, it's less adventuresome, but all the meals (and beer/wine) are included and we only have to unpack once. We decided that the convenience of it is worth trying to see some of the major cities (Barcelona, Rome, Florence) in one day. Just a thought. I feel very confident that by doing this, it has relieved a lot of stressful travel and we can just enjoy being together in Europe.

Our family of four traveled to London, Paris, Bologna, and Venice this past summer. We had thought we would take the train form Paris to Bologna but it turned out that flying was cheaper and much, much quicker so don't rule that out for yourselves, especially if you look at the budget airlines like Ryan Air or EasyJet. That said, we took the EuroStar from London to Paris, mainly for the experience of going through the chunnel but it was also pretty economical and very quick (under two hours) and it left out of Paddington Station in central Londonno need to haul yourself out to the airports. You didn't ask this, but I'll offer it anyway. Instead of staying in hotels, look into the option of staying in apartments. There are quite a few websites that will offer apartments, two of the most well-known are vrbo.com and tripadvisor.com. In each of the cities we stayed, we got 2-bedroom apartments for much less than the cost of one hotel room, and we got kitchens and washer/dryers to boot, plus a lot more room than a hotel room. And every single one of them were in extremely central locations, close to subway stops and such. And we felt more a part of the area, living in an apartment, than we have when we've stayed in hotels. Look into it for yourselves and see what you think. Carol