First time traveller! Planning two week trip, but very overwhelmed :)

The more you move, the more you pay in train costs. I have a strong bias toward limiting it to one country, or at least close together places (and I would hate to have to fly in the middle of a trip--so much time wasted). Have you considered a week in Paris and a week on the riviera? Or, fly into Paris and out of {insert Italian city}?
You are trying to pack too much in, once you focus in on where like a laser beam, the logistics will get a lot easier!

Choose 2 locations (3 max). Everything Italy or France or Spain. You've got at least 3 vacations on this itinerary. Your goal is to enjoy and soak it in; not spend two weeks traveling between destinations and checking in/out of hotels.

You mentioned a tour. How about one of the Rick Steves My Way tours? You have transport and accommodations but you are otherwise on your own for your daily itinerary. Sort of helps for a situation like this.

Paris is really easy on your own, but as a first time traveler, there's always a learning curve.

I think you are overwhelmed because you are trying to go to a lot of places that aren’t very close together for a two week trip. Personally I have found that four places in two weeks is a good amount. That means typically two places with three nights and two places with four. You have six far flung places.

Trains are easiest way to get around but sometimes distance makes a flight make sense. Airports are not in the center of the city and you do have to arrive earlier for a flight than a train. You might want to consider a less far flung itinerary. It might be less logistically challenging to do either France and Italy or France and Spain.

I agree you’ve got too much going on

You won’t be seeing Europe , you’ll be seeing various train and planes.

Paris is your daughter’s big wish so spend a week there and really enjoy it, especially if you want to go to Giverny

Then pick one other location and go there and spend some time.

Go to the library or bookstore. Get Europe Through the Back Door. It’s a “how to” for first time travelers

I would do Paris and then fly to Venice. After Venice train to Florence and then Rome. Italian cities are easily accessible by train. Adding southern France and Spain to this itinerary is too much. Personally for us, Nice and Monaco are a skip.

First of all, your passport is all you need, no visas, BUT, beginning in 2025 you will have to fill out an online form for travel to Europe. Do not worry about that now, come back to the forum in January for more info on that subject.

Second, can you check flights in and out of major cities, such as into Paris out of London. It is easy to get from Paris to London via the train, and not outrageously expensive. As mentioned above, not moving too much cuts down on the costs.

Once you decide on your 2 cities, you can get Rick’s guidebooks (either buy or go to the library), and search for hotel recommendations. Then you can search here for reviews of the hotels and/or check booking.com for more reviews and prices. Most of the time people here on the forum, myself included, then book directly with the hotel.

After hotels are booked, you can get into the nitty-gritty of the actual day-to-day planning., which for most of us is the fun part.

Good luck.

Most of us are overwhelmed at this early stage, and it's just part of the process. As you read and research, you'll gravitate towards certain locations. I expect your daughter will also be doing some research. You have a lot of time, but I would have a final itinerary by the end of August, and book lodging then,
Use Google flights to research costs, and set up alerts. You can actually search from your airport to "Europe", and see flight costs all over Europe for your dates. You can look at an entire month for cost variations by day.
Always buy your airline tickets directly from the airline, once you've done your research.
Fly into one city and out of the final city, a multi - flight itinerary, or open jaw.
Flying inside Europe sometimes takes the same amount of time as a train, once you figure in getting to the airport early, etc. Depends on the distance and the schedules .
Decide on four locations max.
Cross- country rail passes usually aren't worth it anymore, especially for two weeks.
You need more time in Paris. So often flights are delayed/ canceled. Build in an extra day at the beginning if you have a major flight delay.
I wouldn't do Rome for a day, it will take a day to get there, and it too far from your other ideas.
No Visa required for Europe if you have a US passport .
You'll have a great mother- daughter trip. Read everything here, get some guide books, join Facebook groups for your cities of interest, and watch u- tube videos. Give yourself a month of research. Enjoy!

Hi, welcome to the Forum! My 2 cents:
May will be a great time to go; fewer crowds, good weather.
You have plenty of time to plan - many months; there is no hurry. Do not let it stress you, instead embrace it; view the planning as part of the fun.
Fly multi city - into Paris, out of Rome or Milan. You will have your choice of several airlines. Do not pursue the Iceland stopover.
Stay 3 full days in Paris in addition to the day you arrive. On day 4, fly to somewhere in Italy, perhaps Venice, PIsa, or Florence. Stay rest of trip in Italy. Once in Italy, it is very easy and inexpensive to get around by train. Do not use RailEurope, use trenitalia.com. But only to look; do not try to buy any train tickets now; wait until next spring. Use city names Venezia SL, Firenze SML, Roma, etc.
Get at library or buy Rick Steves Paris and Italy books. User the Italy book to help pick 2 or 3 places in Italy for 2-3 days each.
If you are American citizens, your passport is all you need, no others visas needed.
Look on booking.com to find places to stay; very easy and user friendly.

You can easily plan this trip yourself! You will have a great trip!

For 2 weeks, which becomes more like 12 days when you factor arriving and departing the continent, I’d stick with 2 countries. Maybe arrive Paris and spend 4 nights there before flying to Monaco. Spend 2 nights there and then head to Liguria and then Florence. You’d have maybe 6 nights to split between Liguria and Tuscany. You’d be able to see Lucca, Pisa and Florence, all by train. I personally don’t think you have enough time to add Rome, much less destinations in Spain. I think that’s a different trip, but I don’t like bouncing too much when I travel and generally have a minimum of three nights in a location.

As for some of your specific questions - I’d purchase train tickets, as opposed to a rail pass. I’ve never found a train pass to be worth the money in my 30+ trips to Europe. Look at Booking.com and/or Airbnb for accommodations. I can usually find a place to be comfortable for less than a $100 a night. Save some money by visiting markets like Mercato Centrale in Florence for making the occasional meal at home. I’ll be in Italy starting next month for close to four weeks and I think my entire trip will cost me between $3500-4000, and that’s without really denying myself anything.

All of the above. Read Rick's "Europe Through the Back Door" (any edition, the basics are the same, get it from your library if you don't want to buy it). Pick two places (I would choose Paris and Barcelona or Paris and Rome. Take your time planning. Include a day trip or two in each place. Leave empty space. One of the real treats of your first trip to Europe is just "being in Europe".

All good advice above. I'd suggest Paris for about a week, then either Italy or Spain for the other. If it's Italy, Rome needs more than a day, you could spend the second week there, or in Florence, or Venice, or any two of those three. If it's Spain, you could split the week between Barcelona and Madrid, or Madrid and Seville. I'd suggest flying between your two countries because they're far enough apart that it would save time. If either of you speaks any Italian or Spanish that could be the basis for deciding -- not because you need fluency in a language, but because you'll have an easier time with signage, phrases, and such.

When you've chosen your destinations, look for flights that take you from home to Paris, then from your final city back to home. This "multi-city" fare should be comparable with a round-trip fare and it will save you the time and cost of backtracking in Europe.

Then hotels in your two or three cities, looking for central locations and affordability. Your total $8000 budget seems very low to me. Hotels may be cheaper on the outskirts, but you don't want to spend too much time "commuting" to the places and things you've come to see. Your time is your most valuable commodity.

Travel between France, Italy, and Spain doesn't require any kind of immigration or customs. It's like travel between two American states. You will have airport security, probably less onerous than in the US, and if you go by train you may have to put your bags through an xray before boarding.

Congratulations to your daughter, I hope you have a wonderful first trip to Europe with many more to come.

You have received good advice already. I will add just a few things:
1) You asked about layover in Iceland via Icelandair's stopover. If you are budget conscious, you may want to skip Iceland as it is Expensive. For 3 days we spent almost as much as our 2 weeks in Ireland. Just some perspective on cost. But as an option, it's great and super easy to do. Just costs a lot.
2) My opinion is that you could do Paris, Florence and either Barcelona or Madrid for 14 nights on the ground. If you have less than 14 actual sleeping nights in Europe, I'd stick to 2 cities.
3) If you chose to city hop, I'd suggest looking in to flights between cities as often times they save time, are more convenient and are cheaper than taking trains. I love trains and take them when I can but the reality is you don't have a ton of time and you need to consider how you want to spend your hours and your budget.

I hope you both have an amazing trip! You will have to come back to let us know what you chose to do.

You have received a lot of good advice. I also agree to limit your time to two main cities/countries. The less transferring to other places, the less logistics needed and the better opportunity to really experience the places you’re in. This is such a wonderful opportunity for you and your daughter to make beautiful memories! You’ll only need your passports, but make sure they won’t expire for at least 6 months after you return home. Many countries require this.

I think most seem to agree that Paris is easily worth a week of your two. It really can be a magical (and EASY) place to just enjoy - and you can pack in all sorts of cultural things too.

On the flip side, a really easy "two/three" city itinerary is the Madrid-Cordoba-Seville trio. They're all linked easily by train, so it's easy to logistically pull it off with no extra plane travel. There are cheap Euro plane flights, but trains work super well and are less of a drag.

If you really want Paris, post the question in the France forum. If you're open to Spain (or Italy), post in the specific country forum.

Personally, I've never linked Paris and Amsterdam as a 1-2 punch, but I would consider that a great contrast of two wonderful cities.

Last comment-
Do you want to do all bustling cities, or would you want to intersperse the trip with some small towns/villages? Just a thought.
Also, I do like the Paris- Amsterdam thought, as you could explore some smaller areas in the NL and Belgium.
Just some ideas....

Congratulations on your daughter's upcoming bachelor's degree and on your upcoming master's!!

Have you discussed the itinerary with your daughter? Has either of you been to Europe before? I'm guessing that your logistics aren't the way you presented them: fly into Paris, then travel to Rome, back to France, then on to Spain, but that's the way it reads. That would be much time and money spent to zigzag around three countries even without going back and forth. It also sounds like you want to spend some time in Iceland. You need two months!
If your daughter picks her top two countries and you do the same, negotiate and pick two. I agree with the other poster who suggested an open jaw--fly into one airport/country and out of another.

You might fly into Paris and out of Rome or vice versa. You could spend one week in each city and take day trips from them. From Paris, you can easily take a train to Giverny and/or Chartres and several others. From Rome, you can easily take a train to Florence for the day. In December, my husband, adult son and I are flying into Rome for four days, then flying into Palermo, Sicily for four days and then taking a direct flight to Paris for a week and flying home from there.
OR, you could fly into Paris and out of Barcelona or Madrid or vice versa. I've flown from Paris to Barcelona for a few days and then flown to Granada for a few more. We then took a train to Seville, stayed a few days, then took a train to Madrid and stayed a few more flying out of Madrid, home. There are so many potential day trips from Barcelona, Seville and Madrid!
Fortunately, you have time to have fun discussing this with your daughter and doing searches. The Rick Steve Forum provides a wealth of information especially in conjunction with his guidebooks.
You will be making some great memories with your daughter and decompressing from finals!

Welcome to this very helpful forum.

You have received some great advice here, but it's probably overwhelming too. You do have time to read the advice and think things through. Each of us on the forum would make different choices about the two weeks, but there is a consensus that you have too many destinations. The fewer places you go, the more manageable the planning, and the easier it will be to stay in your budget, which is doable.

There are several ways to go at this, but if Paris is a given, you could start with that and figure out what you want to see and how long it will take to see it. Three days sounds short if it includes a day trip to Monet's Gardens, but maybe it's enough if you don't want to visit any of the museums. Then when you know how much time you have left, you can see what else fits logically into a trip--more of France, or moving on to Italy for the rest of the trip, or something else.

I personally found the Rick Steves guidebooks to be most helpful for our first trips, because they focus on highlights and don't overwhelm with every possible place you could go. You might check out Europe Through the Backdoor and his France book from the library to get you started.

As you narrow things down, you can return with more questions, including ideas for accommodations in your destinations.

Good luck.

Top budget is $8,000 including flights.

How much you might spend on flights will significantly affect your remaining budget. Not knowing where home is makes it impossible to even guess what you might have available to spend on 'being there'.

Are you planning to do the Iceland stopover within the '2 weeks' you have ( along with the 6 other stops?)

Do country-to-country flights require long waits through customs/security and 2-hour pre-arrival similar to in the states?

Yes, except no 'customs' ( passport control) to deal with. The problem with the intra-Europe flights is the skimpy carry on baggage allowance typical of the European airlines, so it is likely you will be dealing with checking and retrieving bags on each one of the mid trip hops.

Paris to Italy; Rome to Nice; Nice to Spain -- will each entail a day which is primarily devoted to travel and sightseeing will be the secondary activity.

As others have already mentioned, prioritizing and narrowing the list of locations is the only way this trip will be enjoyable and not a 'trek we survived'

congrats and happy travels

As Joe just noted, the cost of your flights is going to significantly affect how much budget you have for the rest of your trip. Where are you flying from? If a big airport with many flight choices you could find better deals. As was suggested use Google Flights to search routes and set fare alerts so you have an idea of going rate. You will want to do several "multi city" searches - arrive one city, fly home from another, also called "open jaw" - for different city pairs (e.g., London/Paris, Paris/Rome, Paris/Barcelona). Icelandair does offer stop overs but it is very expensive to visit there. Don't forget you lose a whole day to travel on the way - so if you only have 14 days, you have 13 days and the first one is usually pretty jet lagged. If your budget gets eaten up by flights then you will probably have to cut days and locations.

One thing not yet mentioned is that RailEurope is a ticket reseller, not a specific train line. Depending on when and where you want to take trains, you will want to use a country-specific train site and buy directly from them. Once you land on your itinerary, you can ask specific questions in the forum about your planned route and best options, there are many train experts here. If flying is a better option people will tell you so.

It is very hard to pick your first trip and you are right there are so many options. You can't go wrong with any of the places you listed, but biting off too much is a recipe for frustration, especially if you spend all your time moving between places and not actually seeing any of them. If Paris is your daughter's biggest ask, then you have one city that merits quite a few of your limited days. Put the other ideas in a hat, pick one, and that will pretty much use the remainder of your time. Making the decision on where will allow you to make a lot of progress planning and it will reduce the overwhelmed feeling you have now. Best of luck to you!

Haven't read all the prior posts in detail, so excuse me if I'm repeating things. Since your daughter's wish is Paris, I suggest spending an entire week there. You will not run our of things to do and see, and you can even take a day trip or two. For the second city consider a week in Venice. A truely unique place. Again, there is plenty to see and do, and you can still take a day trip or two. You should be able to get an inexpensive airline flight between the two. Just a thought.

You can fly from Paris to Florence or Venice. Look at Monastery Stays for accommodations in Italy but book directly with the convent.

Thank you all so much for your kind and helpful responses! I’m blown away by your patience and willingness to share your knowledge.

I already have more peace reading these messages and agree with the consensus that we had too many places to visit. I think both my daughter and I are open to cutting it back. It gives us a chance to go back to Europe someday!

As for Paris– I would be agreeable to a whole week, but I’ve heard it’s a very expensive city. I will look on the forms to see if anyone has had good luck with AirBnb or hostels.

Are most of you saying that $8000 will not be enough Budget wise? We are definitely budget travelers. Charlotte and Raleigh are our closest airports, but if the price was great I would be willing to travel to Dulles.

I don't think people are saying that. In fact, it's close to what we spent on a recent two-week trip that included four nights in Paris in a very centrally located apartment. I think they are saying that once you have bought your plane tickets, you will know what you have left for daily expenses and can adjust accordingly. And by limiting your locations you can control your transportation expenses.

Some real quick 'scratch pad' numbers

Air-- RDU-CDG; FCO-RDU ~$1250 per person r/t ( MAD-RDU would be about $100 per person less)

Lodging- 12-13 nights ~$3000 ( possibly less if not too picky)

Meals, entry fees, local transportation, Paris to Italy( or Spain) travel --- to be done with the last ~$2500

Doing Paris and Italy ( or Paris & Spain) with careful planning is not impossible in your budget.

Happy planning and travels

I will also add that there are "other" options out there that go from relatively inexpensive to expensive but which take a lot of the effort off your shoulders and that is the "group tour" route. Rick Steves has a whole panoply of options (France link).

We've done tours (not with RS) in places like Morocco and Turkey and Peru, where the airfare and the hotel and the logistics between points just played REALLY well vs doing it all ourselves. I regularly get emails from various travel newsletters with a smorgasbord of travel options - group tours, low airfares, combinations of air/hotel/rental car, etc. - and since you have some time, those are reasonable paths to pursue too.

I know it's all perspective, and I can't comment on airfare as we have to fly from SoCal, and sadly, our flight was 2/3 of your entire budget. BUT, we were so surprised at how reasonable meals were in Paris in April. We went to nice, decent, but not extravagant restaurants and it was definitely less expensive than eating out here. Plus baguettes, meats and cheeses make a nice picnic meal. I feel like costs and inflation here have made prices so ridiculously expensive, that Paris didn't feel pricey on a daily basis. Hotels were pricey, but they are pricey globally and Amsterdam hotels were much more expensive than Paris in our experience this past spring. I'm sure there are reasonably priced accommodations to be found in Paris.