Hello all. I've been lurking around the site for a while and I've come across some great advice for our first Europe trip (6 countries, 2 weeks). So thank you for that!
For this portion of our trip: We'll be travelling towards Bavaria from NW Germany (from a small town called Wesel/staying with friends) in a couple weeks. From what I could tell, our options include taking a train all the way to Fussen, staying the night, sightseeing in Fussen, then head to Munich later that day. Just to be clear, we're going to Fussen to see Neuschwanstein although I'm torn on actually seeing inside or not. Leaning towards doing the tour and either reserving a ticket now if we day trip or buying the tickets first thing in the morning at 9am if we stay in Fussen the night before.
2nd option is to fly or train to Munich and either head to Fussen straight away that evening or stay that first night in Munich, and just do a day trip to Fussen the next day. We're also trying to squeeze in a trip to Salzburg after we check-out on the 3rd day before we head to Italy.
I slightly favor the 1st option because I think we'd enjoy being in the center of Fussen for a night and the next morning. And we'd be so close to the castles. Not sure if the weather will cooperate but seeing the area by bicycle seems great as well although I'm sort of pessimistic about that. 2nd option seems doable too but with the transport time it seems like we'd get back to Munich kind of late and have less time to see the surrounding area. And as an extra bonus, we're trying to squeeze Salzburg since we have a late flight on that 3rd day. If we leave Salzburg around 2pm we should be fine.
I have done a lot of research on rome2rio, bahn.com, google flights, etc to get a feel for time tables, stops, trip durations, price comparisons, etc, etc. If we train the whole way, I'll probably get a consecutive German twin rail pass for 3 days (since it is on special right now). If we end up flying, I'll skip the pass, buy the flights, then buy the Bayern ticket for our train travel.
So my questions are: has anyone done something like this? Recommend something different? Did I miss something? Is that trip to Salzburg too much? Somewhere or something else we can see? That very first day of travel is going to be long. But I kind of like the idea of getting a pass and hopping off/on to see some sites along the route, as quick as that may be. Full disclosure: I am exhausted after typing all of that out! ;-)
Thanks for your help!