I am in the process of starting to plan a family trip to Munich and Paris for December 2023. It will my husband and I, along with our daughters who will be aged 8 and 12 at the time of travel. The draw of the trip is the Christmas Markets, but this will also be our first time in the region and my girls first time in Europe, so we will want to see some of the non Christmas based sights as well. My initial plan is that we will fly into Munich, and use Munich as our base and do day trips from there for 7 nights before heading to Paris for 3 nights. I am leaning towards using a Eurail Global pass, since that will allow us to do day trips and travel from Germany to France, but am getting confused about how much I can really use the pass to get to some of the smaller towns in the region. Would it be more beneficial to get a Germany specific pass? Or even perhaps a rental car? I was not looking into renting since that honestly seemed overwhelming and maybe more expensive than using the amazing public transportation options.
Also, I was pretty confident of my choices of day trips, but after reading some of the other posts, I am rethinking what we would like to focus on. Even though not everyone seems to enjoy Munich, we for sure are going to do some of their markets. I'm for sure going to hit Stuttgart, and was thinking Nuremberg, but now am thinking that might be replaced with someplace smaller and perhaps less touristy. I'm adding Esslingen to the list. This is where I start to get super overwhelmed and confused. Again since this will be our first time in the region, it will all be wonderful and new to us, but I also want to make sure I plan a trip that is not too much for our girls, allows us to truly see the area and region and offers us the opportunity to just have a really enjoyable time.
This will not be our last visit to the area, so I'm not worried about the things I will miss out on. I know we will come back and explore and experience more at a later time, I just want to focus on really making sure we spend our time this go round in a meaningful and reasonable way.