I was able to get a couple of business class tickets on various airlines (Austrian and Air France) so we will be arriving in Vienna in mid March and returning from Paris in late March. Other than that we have no plans. Right now we are talking about 16 full days.
We've been to Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Rothenburg, Paris, Brussels, Bern, Milan and several other places in Europe. We aren't opposed to returning to them. I'm thinking while we are recovering from jet lag in Vienna, Bratislava is only an 1 hr train ride away and is probably worth a day trip since we've never been.
After that I'm not sure whether we should go counter clockwise through Prague (never been), into Germany, maybe Luxembourg and onward to Paris for the return flight. Or go clockwise and maybe go to Munich, Lichenstein, Basel and up the southeast side of France to Paris.
I have zero language skills and my wife speak Spanish which won't help on this trip. I wouldn't mind getting to more of northern Italy but that might be too far out of the way. I've done ambitious trips in the past where we were moving cities daily but that was 20 years ago and I wasn't sure I'd ever be back. Now that we've been a few times I'd like to stay in a base location for a few days before moving on, preferably via trains. We've always enjoyed our time in Germany and northern Italy. I've been to Paris before and it wasn't something that captivated me.
Any suggestions?
Since we are currently retired our schedule is flexible and I can, if I can find other flights, modify the return flight for a reasonably small fee. Normally I wouldn't go now but would plan for the Christmas markets at the end of the year but the last few years have had a lot of stuff going on, including health issues and I wanted to do something while we both seem to be healthy and aren't dealing with any other family medical issues (in the past 4 years we've had personal injuries that took forever to heal and had to deal with several family medical issues that made travel impossible).
Thanks.