Need some help planning our northern Europe trip

I went to Scandinavia as part of a Baltic trip. I find transportation from Scandinavia to anywhere is both expensive and inconvenient. We looked at going to Hamburg, from Copenhagen, for a weekend to visit a cousin and decided it wasn't worth the time or money to get there and back, only to visit the cousin for a short time.

I was pretty happy with my choice, a 12 night Baltic cruise, because it got me to all the major cities by sea (traditionally how these cities were approached), gave me a day to see cities that are small enough to visit my must-sees in one day (two days in St. Petersburg). Since the cruise included transportation, lodging and food, it seemed like a good value in otherwise expensive Scandinavia.

If that might be an idea that would work for you, check out vacationstogo.com. They're an online travel agent that specializes in cruises. I find their prices are consistent with other online cruise travel agents (much less than the lines' prices) and they have, by far, the best search engine to explore the options.

Other than Berlin and Schwerin I haven't been in that area recently, but my gut reaction is that 2 weeks is sort of short for driving as far as Belgium then over to Berlin. It's not that the distance is so great, but you'd be rushing past a lot of interesting places to reach the farthest points on the itinerary. The reason for having a car in Europe is to take advantage of the mobility so you can stop in a bunch of small towns and wind through the countryside. That necessarily slows you down.

So I'd recommend getting guidebooks to Germany and Denmark from your library and seeing whether there's enough of great interest in those two countries to more than satisfy you. If you happen to be interested in World War II and/or Cold War history, you could spend nearly a week in Berlin alone.

I suggest using ViaMichelin to check on driving times. I especially liked Quedlinburg, which has a large, unbelievably picturesque historic core, a castle, and a cathedral with an impressive treasury (Google for American connection). I see that Quedlinburg is more than a 7-hour drive from Copenhagen, and VM has a reputation for optimistic time estimates. So going that far into Germany would take the better part of two days without any sightseeing at all.