November-December 2016 Europe Trip

I would switch the amounts of time for Munich and London. Eight days is too much for Munich, and four days is far too little for London. How many nights do you have all together? It's hard to tell from what you have written. To save money on trains you need to buy now. Your trip is only a month away, and cheaper tickets appear 60 days or so out.

That time if year, larger cities offer more. A week in Siena is long. Agree with Nancy about switching the time to London. How about Amsterdam? Ghent, Bruge, Brussels, Strasbourg? I can't help you with Switzerland much. It might be early in the season in the ski areas if that's what you had in mind. Which cities or areas were you thinking about?

We are traveling in Europe for 41 days. I am confirmed and can't change the first portion of the trip:
Madrid - 6 nights
Rome - 1 Night
Siena - 7 nights

After this I have flexibility. How many days do you recommend in London? Also, specifically what would you recommend seeing?

The reason we have 8 days in Munich because of day trips to Salzburg, Fussen and Garmisch-PartenKirchen.

We've changed our itinerary a number of times, mostly because we moved the trip from October to November and December (due to work obligations I had). We originally were hitting Bruge, Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Paris and London, but then expanded our the amount of time we could stay in Europe and added madrid, switzerland, Italy and deleted Vienna and Prague mainly because of the geography and cutting down on travel time. Bruge was eliminated because we added on more days to London (we originally figured we'd come back next year to see London, Scotland and Ireland.

I realize the train tickets need to be purchased early in order for a better rate and I will probably buy a few of them, but also prepared to fly or take a bus or work with the local lines vs some of the high speed rails. Not perfect, but we want to keep some of the trip flexible.

btw - thank you both for your input!

You'll be traveling during the Christmas market season. Have you taken that into account?

Absolutely (having watched the Rick Steves video on christmas markets): We are looking at hitting the ones in: Munich, Lucerne, Salzburg, Bolzano (maybe), Paris, London and possibly Strasbourg. One of the things we wanted to accomplish, was to be in a place long enough to get to know people. Ricks videos lend themselves to that ideology because he always includes people (locals) in his videos. They walk/talk, drink/eat and converse. We would like to experience this but with added dimension. Our first itinerary had us traveling 17 times over 30 days. Now we are traveling 7 times over 41 days. The lateness of the year has us doing more indoor cultural activities as will eating and drinking indoors. My company designs, restores and renovates resorts (San Diego, Guadalajara and Puerto Rico corporations/offices) and my favorite thing to do is hit a cruise. My daughter commented how fun it was to go to Grand Cayman but, asked if next time we could just go there so we could actually get to know the people. that's what we are after. Hopefully, we are doing this in a correct way!

THAT, I did not know! I had checked Florence and I think Milan, without much luck! Greatly appreciated, I will check that now.

Hope you won't be disappointed, but the locals in Rick Steves' videos are often (usually) tour guides whom he has known from prior visits -- don't expect to be invited to someone's home just because you visit their coffee shop three times. But spending longer time in a location DOES give you a chance to feel more connected.

Thanks Laura. I sort of figured since he intros a lot of them as "fellow tour guides" that these are "setups" for the purpose of the shoot, nonetheless I like the feel, if not the reality. I travel extensively and for long time periods for work, so I'm sort of use to finding fun little locals on days off where, over time, you sort of feel like a local. Europe will be different for us because we haven't had a lot of experience, but my son, being ever inventive, was practicing his German and Italian via pen pals and sought out some idea of what to expect and some suggestions on what to see and what to wear from the people he practiced language skills with.

Our itinerary is loose cause we want the flexibility to change our minds on what to do during our stays. As an example: Siena has one day wine tasting in Montepulciano, another in Pisa, another in Florence and another in Cortana at a unique one day cooking school. Then we have three days to figure out what we want to do or just sit around sipping wine by the town square (like on a weekend) watching people. With the idea the weather can interfere with anything.

I think the real issue I may have is waiting too long to buy train tickets, although I did budget for prices I found online via the train
systems of each country.

Thanks James, agreed!

Thanks James: Another great piece of advice! I did find the cooking school in both paris and Cortona via trip advisor, also, use them as a litmus test on other places we think about seeing. Switzerland was one, but I think the country as a whole will just be expensive. Where is your company located where you do the introductions?