First "family" trip to Europe - UK/Germany - Advice Sought

One of the big issue you need to deal with is English/London Christmas practices. It is my understanding (no experience in London) that all of England pretty well shuts down for all of Christmas day and the day after -- Boxing Day. Our experience is other parts of Europa during this time is that thing do shut down starting about noon on Christmas eve. So you may have two and half days of dead time to plan for. The Christmas markets in all of Germany will close at noon on Christmas eve.

It is a long ways to Berlin from London. Train is out - even a night train. And then a long ways to Munich. I would skip Berlin. I would consider London--Paris--Strasbourg--Munich. Another issue is the possibility of weather interruption at that time year. A few years ago we did Strasbourg, Rothenberg, Munich, and Prague in that time period (Christmas in Munich) and Nyears in Prague and had two bad days of weather that disrupted travel badly because it happen to be our two planned big days of travel. Lots of train delay and re-routing. Made for unplanned long days.

I have no idea whether you'll find a lively place in the countryside to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but I do know that you'll burn some valuable hours checking out of your London hotel and then returning to the city for a separate 2-night stay before heading to Germany. I would need a really compelling reason to have 3 separate hotel stays over that 6-day (?) period. There is tons to do in London, and between closures around Christmas Day and the effects of possible jetlag, you won't have much time to see the city if you decamp to the countryside.

LondonWalks has walking tours around the holidays, so--weather permitting--that would be one way to occupy part of your time in the city when many sights are closed. The website (see link) currently has the summer schedule posted, but the winter schedule begins on November 1, so you will soon be able to see exactly what will be available during the period of your visit. I've taken many of the walks and enjoyed all of them. The city walks do not require pre-booking, so you can just wake up, check the weather, and show up at the designated meeting point.

Berlin has a lot of WW II and Cold War sights. I find it more interesting than Munich, but Berlin doesn't have the Old World German architecture many people seek. You'll need to dig into a guide book to figure out how to divide your German time.

The issue you are going to have for the UK element is finding somewhere for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I presume you won’t be hiring a car? That means you will be travelling by train on a busy travel day, on a system that starts shutting down from mid afternoon. There is no public transport on Christmas Day and limited services on Boxing Day.

Shops are not permitted to open on Christmas Day, but some restaurants or pubs will be open at lunchtime. Many pubs will not be serving food, just drinks. Any serving food will be very expensive. The other issue you may have is that places are already fully booked for Christmas lunch. You are unlikely to find anywhere in the countryside offering food on Christmas Day evening.

Hiring a cottage would give you more flexibility, but you aren’t likely to find anyone prepared to take a booking for less than a week at that time of year. My conclusion would be to stay in London, which would be less fraught as more places will be open and London Walks operate on Christmas Day, I understand.

Berlin is one of my favourite cities - fly, as taking a train doesn’t make sense unless you want to spend half your holiday in transit. You need to book flights ASAP, as prices are increasing, but EasyJet still have availability this week from Gatwick for under £100 pp. The Eurostar from London to Paris is more expensive than this.

I looked at the London Walks website. If you click on dates on the calendar at the top of the page, the schedule for each day is posted; for example, there are 3 walks scheduled for Christmas Day, including "The Christmas Day Charles Dickens Walk", which sounds pretty interesting, at least to me.

Berlin is my favorite city. There is much to do there. I don't know your budget or your tolerance of cold weather for walking tours, but you may consider a walking tour with Robert Sommer, particularly in light of your teens' ages. Robert was the 15-year-old son of a fairly high ranking East German bureaucrat on Nov 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall opened. You and your teens would hear first-hand stories about crossing into West Berlin from a native East Berliner. His Cold War tour would probably make the most sense for this, but he offers other tours, too. Given that the unification of Germany was really the conquest of East Germany by West Germany, it's also interesting to hear a "non-victor's view" of modern German history. For low-cost group tours, Insider Tour gets high marks on this forum, though I have not used them.

If you have time for a stop between Berlin and Munich, consider Nuremberg for WWII history (Nazi Party Rally Grounds including its Documentation Center and Courtroom 600 of Nuremberg Trial fame [open for viewing primarily on weekends -- still used as a courtroom during the week]); you can also do a day trip from there to a town like Bamburg, which has the "expected" German architecture. You could also do Nuremberg as a day trip from Munich.

Munich definitely has its fans. I will say I spent 3 nights there a few years ago (including a day trip to southern Bavaria); it was enough for me.

Do you plan to fly home from your last city? You should. Choose "Multi-City" on the airline reservation page.

I also find Munich missable. I have no experience in 50 trips to Europe, but overnight trains are a disappearing anachronism-NOT a romantic reminder of James Bond or Hercule Poirot.

If you are determined to see more cities, drop Munich and take the Eurostar from London to Paris or Brussels, then fly to Berlin. If you have tickets home from Munich already (you are unclear on this) my suggestion is worthless.

Watch for increases in the current one-hour Immigration time allowance for international train boarding in London if there is a Brexit.

Thanks for the replies. It was a local who recommended going out of London for Christmas. I do think that will be hard, so I'm planning on nixing it.

I had considered the overnight to Berlin as there were lots of sights saying how easy this was. Maybe it's not based on all the comments. I'll look closer now.

We have flights out of Munich already. There are easy direct flights from there to our home airport, so finishing the trip there seemed reasonable.

When I was younger I took several night trains and survived the experience, though I never slept well, which affected my energy level and focus the next day. It's important to look at the detailed route of the train to see how many stops there are after you hope you will be sleeping. It's not uncommon to have 6 to 10 stops between midnight and 6 AM. Every stop is accompanied by braking, considerable station noise, and acceleration. It's difficult for most people to sleep through that sort of thing. Sometimes night-train routings include a transfer in the middle of the night, which is even more sleep-disrupting.

The Deutsche Bahn website is the easiest one to use if you're looking for details about a train's routing. Identify the depature that includes a night train so there will be sleeping cars available (some are "NJ", for Night Jet), click on Show details, then click on Show intermediate stops for the full picture. The 7:06 PM InterCity departure from Paris arrives in Mannheim at 10:17 PM, where you would connect to the 11:59 PM NightJet. So there's a 100-minute layover at a time of night when you would probably prefer to be lying down if not actually sleeping. This night train is better than many in that there are only 3 stops between boarding and 6 AM, but how would you feel about being awakened by a bunch of noise at 12:47 AM, 3:37 AM, and 5:31 AM?

My last (in both senses of the word) overnight train trip was from Rome to Sicily, and it was a nightmare of constant jerks and literally not one minute of sleep. I lost the entire next day (basically, I slept) and was off-schedule even after that. It was a costly mistake, but I was on a long trip and was still able to hit all my major sightseeing targets.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think a night train is a worse idea, the shorter the trip, because on a short trip you'll probably have no recovery time if you do not get a decent night's sleep. To keep the itinerary on track, you'll just have to sleep-walk through the next day.

That said, I realize that a night train is--at least in theory--an interesting experience, and I suspect that the teenagers will probably sleep fairly well. But I fear at this point the rail fare from London to Berlin over the holidays will be quite high, and the basic fares you see for this trip will not include any sleeping accommodations. The latter do not come cheap, and budget hotels are much more comfortable than berths on a night train.

Thanks. I took an overnight from Paris to Venice once and loved it. But I'll consider a flight as they are around $120 now. The kids can enjoy a train to Munich in the end and be fine with it. And that will give us more time in Berlin seems to have a lot to offer.

Yes, there is a great deal to see in Berlin, especially if one has an interest in WWII and/or the Cold War. I spent six days in the city in 2015 and didn't have time for the German History Museum. I did, however, go to a lot of art museums--more than most people would choose to visit on a single trip.

The issues in Berlin are the size of the city (it sprawls), the scattered location of the many interesting sights (meaning much time on the S-Bahn or U-Bahn) and the fact that many of the sights take a lot of time to absorb. Since the city lacks much in the way of historic architecture, there's not a lot of walking by places; you will mostly be going inside them, and in my experience those visits took multiple hours because there was so much interesting information presented in English. I'd guess that I spent an average of about 4 hours at each historic sight, but it's true that I'm obsessive about reading every bit of English-language information.

if you plan on taking a cheap flight on a discount carrier such as Ryan Air, it's important to understand their business model. I think they break even on the flight, but make a ton of money on baggage fees. So, if you can carry on everything with their restrictive carryon limits, they can be cheap, but if you have to check, you can pay a bunch. You win if your carryons are small and can pass their limits, which are on the website. Also book directly with Ryan Air, not through CheapoAir or other travel website, which can save $25/ticket on booking fees.

These are all great cities, but that is a lot of unnecessary travel. Why not visit places more close together?

Also, going in December, be sure to wear a heavy overcoat, hat, scarf, gloves and warm footwear. Also, days are short, it gets dark at 4:30 in Germany in December. Good for museums.

Why not do London and Paris (take the chunnel train)?

I traveled with kids a lot and found it is best to treat the kids like adults. Have them read books on where they are going.
I took my 11 year old daughter on a trip to Mexico and had her read a book about the ancient Aztecs and pre-Aztec cultures in the Mexico City area, as well as the Cortes conquest of the Aztecs. She later majored in Latin American history.

Well, we are back, so I figure I should share our experience.

First, it was great. Maybe a bit too long for the kids. They missed their friends and unlimited data, but oh well.

We ended up changing some plans mid-trip, but we did 5 nights in London, 2 in Berlin, and 7 in Munich.

London was great. Weather was amazing. It was cold, but only sprinkled once or twice. Yes, there were some small issues with holidays, but nothing major. We found a great Christmas lunch and ended up doing a boxing day tour to Windsor/Stonehenge/Bath. It was fast-paced and "big bus", but it allowed us to cram in a lot in a day. Stonehenge was better than I expected.

We had some very memorable experiences. In a pub, we ran into a group from the Queen's guard who participate in the Changing of the Guard. They were really nice folks and we spent some time with them talking and drinking. They invited us to Christmas service at the Guard's chapel to watch them play. They were there in their red uniforms and sounded great. We'll never forget that.

We did a walking tour Christmas even and it was quite nice.

We flew to Berlin on 12/28 (good call on not doing an overnight train) and it just didn't really suit my wife. We did two nights and did a really nice two days of walking tours with someone I found via the forums here. And the Christmas market was superb. But she rebooked us to Munich on 12/30 and we headed out of town early.

The train was easy peasy and really nice.

Munich was fantastic. I could have spent more time there for sure. I think we have some Bavarian in us. People had told us to even skip Munich. Odd. We stayed in the Andaz on LeopoldStrasse. It was really nice, though understaffed. It was a nice stroll to the U-bahn. We spent a lot of time down in the center at the market and shopping areas. I finally got the see the Glockenspiel do it's thing one day.

New Year's Eve in Munich is a sight to see. There are no professional fireworks, but the entire town lights up with people on the streets firing them off. Someone gave my wife a rocket, but it got confiscated by the police heading to Marienplatz (the only place you can't have them).

We did a 3rd Reich walking tour, a city walking tour, Dachau, Salzburg, Neuschwanstein Castle. We ate at some really cool places and met lots of people. I also learned saunas in Germany are more fun when you just relax and go with the flow. :-O

In the end, it's interesting how opinions vary and travel styles vary even with in a family. I learned to just not over plan and expect to wing it a lot. Except for dinners. Reservations are a must.

I think we have decided to spend holidays overseas from now on!

Thanks for all your comments. I hope you each had great holiday experiences. Here's to a great 2020 filled with travel. My next trip is Romania in May. I always love that one.