My family and I are spending four weeks in Europe this summer (June/July). There are three of us--my husband, myself, and our 11-year-old daughter.
Our itinerary for the first three weeks is mostly set, with lodgings booked in London, Brussels (where we'll be attending the bicentennial commemoration and reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo), Paris, and the Dordogne near Sarlat. That gives us one week remaining, which we'd like to spend in Spain. Our interests aren't necessarily the standard ones--I'm a Napoleonic Era history buff, so I'd like to see some of the Duke of Wellington's Spanish battlefields, and my husband and I are both fascinated by Ancient Rome and therefore want to visit some Roman ruins. Our daughter is just hoping for swimming pools and wifi connections, but I'm hoping the history bug will bite her as long as we don't push her too hard, and she is interested in art.
We'll have a rental car for our stay in the Dordogne, and at first I thought we'd turn it in and use trains to get around in Spain. But the more I looked at the train schedule, the harder that looked. Now the plan is to keep the car and make it a road trip. So my first question is whether anyone here has driven extensively in Spain, whether they'd recommend it, and if there's anything we should be wary of in our planning.
The second issue is how to plan out our itinerary. My initial draft is as follows:
7/1 - drive from Sarlat to San Sebastian, stay one night
7/2 - San Sebastian to Segovia, with possible stops along the way to look at battle sites in/near Vitoria and Burgos
7/3 - Segovia to Salamanca (which in addition to being a worthy site in its own right has a battle site just outside of town)
7/4 - Salamanca to Merida (possible battle site side trip to Badajoz)
7/5 - Merida to Madrid (possible battle site side trip to Talavera)
7/7 - fly from Madrid to London (where we'll have a one day break before our flight back to Seattle, bright and early on 7/9)
I'm a bit concerned that gives us too many one-night stops, but I'm not sure what to cut. I don't want to take what may be my only lifetime trip to Spain and not see at least some of the battlefields I've been reading about for half my adult life. But I also don't want to spend the last week of our trip hustling frantically from one place to the next when the rest of our itinerary is all about settling in--we'll have 5 nights each in Paris and the Dordogne, for example.
Any thoughts/advice?
Thanks,
Susan