need help with my itinerary

First recommendation: plan your trip based on trains. Deutsche Bahn is main provider.

Impression: really too much towns in Bavaria.

We would like to see Rhine river castles via boat, but I understand
that the daily cruises end on Oct. 20. Is this correct?

Only valid for provider KD, other offer tours on weekends until November 3., e.g. BR.

I know Hamburg or Berlin are close to Schwerin. I don't really have an
interest in either city

Before / after Schwerin you can visit nice Lübeck.

With what you already wish to see in time limit neither Berlin nor Hamburg really make sense. Only the idea to plan a night stopover in Berlin between Schwerin and Dresden until Oct. 20 to walk around in Berlin's illuminated city during Festival of Lights.

We are not museum goers. We like to spend our day walking and enjoy
being outdoors taking in old architecture and stopping along the way
for coffee or a beer. We also like nature and light hiking. We really
enjoy visiting small towns... I'd like to know the best town to set up base and day trip to minimize 1 or 2 nighters.

The Rhine offers more of what you seek than just the boat ride (about 1.5 hours) and the walk to Rheinfels Castle in St. Goar (which might take 15 minutes.) With Boppard as a base town, you can visit all the usual Rhine towns and castles on day trips by train - and do some nature walks - and you could also include a day trip to the Mosel River. 3-4 nights there is about right.

• Hike from St. Goar to Oberwesel on the Rhine Castle trail with a stop at the Günderodehaus

• Boppard Chairlift + hiking area with views: Four-lakes-lookout (Vierseenblick) and Gedeon's Corner terrace

• Visit Braubach - and take a 30-minute uphill hike from town for a tour of Marksburg (intact medieval castle.)

• March around Braubach and Oberwesel's old towns for a look at the old half-timbered buildings and town walls.

• Take a train ride from Boppard along the Rhine to Koblenz and up the Mosel River to Cochem for a tour of Reichsburg Castle, a visit to the Bundesbank Bunker, a river cruise to Beilstein and back. Cochem has no shortage of cafes in the old town and on the waterfront if you're hunting down Kaffee und Kuchen.

• Mainz is a good place to visit for most of a day as you travel between the smaller Rhine towns and some other base town (like Nuremberg, Bamberg or Würzburg.) You can park your bags in a station locker, see Mainz, then in the evening catch a train to Boppard.

I neglected to mention that Boppard establishments offer a special perk - a "guest card" or Gästekarte which provides free local train and bus transportation to other nearby towns on the Rhine and Mosel (including Cochem) - it would cover most of your outings.

https://www.vrminfo.de/en/tickets/tickets/ticket-offers/network-tickets/

Hi,

I went to Schwerin once as a day trip, definitely not enough time and a repeat trip or two is planned. If you happen to be in Hamburg, then take the train from Hamburg Hbf to Schwerin, much better than going from Berlin, depending on the route because you might end up doing berlin to Schwerin via Hamburg.

I went from Hamburg, it's shorter and direct. If you're going to Schwerin from Dresden, then I assume you are spending the a few nights in Schwerin.

Take the EC train Dresden Hbf to Berlin Hbf, (direct), then change to a regional train Berlin Hbf to Schwerin...all in all it's long ride but very doable.

The trains from Hamburg Hbf to Schwerin continue on to Rostock, the terminus.

Frankly, given your interests (no museums, no big cities, old architecture, castles and small towns), I would recommend a road trip. Skip Dresden (very small reconstructed centre, lots of museums), travel leisurely from Munich (airport) via Central Germany to Schwerin, back to Munich via the Middle Rhine), and see Small town Germany. A itinerary could look like this:

Munich (arrival day) - Bamberg (14.10.) - Erfurt + Weimar or Wartburg castle (15.+16.10.)) - Harz (Quedlinburg, Goslar or Wernigerode (17.+18.10.)) - Schwerin (+ Wismar or Lübeck (19.+20.10.)) - Hameln or Marburg (21.10.) - Middle Rhine (22.+23.10.) - Rothenburg + Nördlingen or Dinkelsbühl (24.+ 25.10.) - Neuschwanstein + Alps (26.-28.10) - departure (29.10.)

This way you see a bit of everything (Brick Gothic of Northern Germany, half-timbered houses of Central Germany, stonebuilt towns of Southern Germany), not just Bavaria and the Middle Rhine.

Russ knows his stuff, but I like the Bavarian areas. I agree that Dresden is an outlier and doens't make sense on this trip.

If you decide to spend less time on the Rhine and more time in Bavaria (although it's technically Franconia), Bamberg and Nuremberg are wonderful, and I think you'd especially like Bamberg and the hiking trail to the 7 different breweries. There's lots of beer-related hiking in that area, now that I think about it. Regensburg is beautiful, but it's a bit far for this trip, too. And you're well-positioned in that area to hit one of the Romantic Road towns (it doesn't have to be Rothenberg odT! Noerdlingen is my personal favorite combining ease of access, beautiful buildings and wall you can walk, and less tourists than RodT.

A rail map may be helpful in planning your trip - every state railway agency in Germany has a detailed map on their website.

Your travel interests seem similar to mine. A little bit of culture goes a long way. We like experiencing the outdoors when we travel and seeing the flora and fauna of a place.

My husband and I stayed in Munich last year for 3 days and I agree that if you're not into museums, 2 days enough. While there, we really enjoyed: renting bikes at the train station and riding to and around the English Garden; doing the RS walking tour, doing a Third Reich bike tour with Mike's Bikes and visiting Dachau ( enjoy isn't the right word, but I'm glad we went. If you go, bring tissues). One thing that we didn't do, that I wish we had was go rafting on the Isar river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlpvzjglvos

I had wanted to do a tour with this place, but their schedule didn't match ours: https://dark-history.eu/

There's an interesting spa/waterpark near Munich, but I haven't personally been: https://www.therme-erding.de/

While seeing the castles in Fussen this year, we will be staying in GP, mainly to "hike" in the gorge. While there, we plan to pop over to MIttenwald and maybe Innsbruck (we are renting a car) to wander around, eat in cafes and enjoy the mountains.

In Fussen, there's a cool place nearby where you can ride a gondola, have a beer on top of the mountain, watch ( or go) paragliding and ride a luge:https://en.schwangau.de/sightseeing/the-tegelberg-cable-car-and-summer-luge/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3INYPiXnZM

Of the other places you mentioned, we enjoyed Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The Night Watchman's Tour was fun.

Bacaharach was a kinda boring spot, but we enjoyed renting bikes and riding along the Rhine to Rudesheim ( very cute spot for an afternoon). The cruise back to St. Goar was just OK in my books.

We loved hiking up to Burg Eltz, more than visiting the castle itself.

Whatever you do, I am sure you will have an amazing trip. Germany is beautiful!

Geography and place names:

Bavaria is a "Land" - a German state - and a huge state stretching from Germany's southern border north to towns like Coburg and Aschaffenburg (in Frankfurt's back yard.)

Franconia is a region with its own historical and cultural identity that lies mostly within northern Bavaria.

" We like to spend our day walking and enjoy being outdoors taking in old architecture"

Within Bavaria, Franconia tends to be somewhat better for old-world towns (walls, towers, castles) than extreme southern Germany (Alps) where the emphasis is on murals:
Mittenwald:
Oberammergau
Garmisch-Partenkirchen

Nördlingen is an outstanding old walled town sort of in between north and south. Unlike Rothenburg's residents, those of Nördlingen do not all spend their working lives serving tourists - it's a living, breathing, German town rather than just a museum/amusement park.

It wasn't my intention to send you only to the Rhine. I could easily see spending 4 days there and another 10 just within Bavaria (and its sub-region Franconia,) a widespread and diverse place which some Germans think of as an independent country in certain ways.

If it's true that you'll never be going back, I suggest you pay a visit to SALZBURG too - Austrian, but terribly easy to hit on a visit to Bavaria.

One add-on to last entry of Russ.

Beside today's Bayern state some people around Speyer (Palatinate) also like the old regional feeling "Kingdom of Bavaria" in which "Rheinbayern" was an exclave of Bavaria.

You can find that historically culture and region overlaying nearly everywhere in Germany plus mixing the different cultures in the cities.