Advice on Itinerary
We're trying to work out a last minute itinerary for myself, my husband, and our daughter who will be turning 2 on the trip. We're going to be there the last week of June and the first week of July.
We'll be flying into Rome for a 16 day trip. After landing, we'll be renting a car and heading to Montalcino for the first 5 days, where we will be staying with family in the countryside. We plan to explore the surrounding area during these days and relax at the house and pool.
With the rest of the trip, we thought 2 more destinations might be the right amount to not spend our trip moving from place to place. We know we would like to go to Lauterbrunnen, likely staying in Murren, to do some hiking and enjoy the cooler mountain weather, but we don’t want to spend 10-11 days there and stay the entire remainder of the trip. We plan to drop off the rental car before leaving Italy, whether in Milan or else another destination connected by high-speed rail, and then taking the trains through Switzerland until we depart for home.
We're trying to figure out what makes the most sense for the other destination. It seems like it would make the most sense to stay somewhere in northern Italy, like Verona or Bologna, so we can take our time driving north before dropping off the car, and then take the the high speed rail to Milan and onward to Switzerland, so we can enjoy the views from the train on the way to Lauterbrunnen. Otherwise, if we try to make Lauterbrunnen the middle stop, we'd have the drive from Montalcino to Milan and then the Swiss trains, making it likely it would be dark when we arrive in Lauterbrunnen. However, there's no airport in Lauterbrunnen, which means if it's our last stop then our travel day home will be that much longer with hours of train travel to get to the airport. If we go straight to Lauterbrunnen, we could backtrack to somewhere in northern Italy, or plan to stay somewhere closer to another airport (the geneva, basel, or zurich airport) as our last leg.
I’m particularly interested in Annecy, which seems like an easy drive to the Geneva airport if we were to hire a car or find a shuttle service, but it is also a long way from Lauterbrunnen and we would have a 2 year old that needs a car seat for any car rides with us. We aren’t interested in Lake Como. Bern looks nice, but doesn’t have an international airport. Lucerne doesn't look quite as interesting. Colmar looks gorgeous, but seems to have the same problems as Annecy. Thoughts?
If we go somewhere in Northern Italy, I was trying to look for something that appears special enough to dedicate our very limited time there on, but also convenient enough to our route. Verona seems like as far east as we could go and still have a train route schedule to Lauterbrunnen that looks reasonable for our circumstances. It looks like it has some beautiful day trips from it, but we also enjoy strolling outside our door and wandering. If we go to that area, would you recommend staying in Verona, or is there a nearby village that you would recommend as our base, like on Lake Garda?
We’ve played around with a lot of routes. The easiest thing would be to cut out Lauterbrunnen altogether and remain in northern italy, but we would really like to keep it for this year, to do some of the hikes while our daughter is still small enough to be easily carried by me and before we have a second. I’m just having trouble figuring out the rest.
–Would you recommend just making Murren/Lauterbrunnen our last stop and dealing with the extra train travel on the final day?
–Would you recommend going directly from Montalcino to Murren/Lauterbrunnen and then back tracking to northern italy before flying back?
–Or should we bite the bullet and have one more hotel change, and do 1 night at the end closer to the airport so that we can keep Murren/Lauterbrunnen as our last longer stop?