Best Place To Pick Up Rental Car AFTER Bacharach

I would say the airport is the easiest. You can easily get there by train and several rental agencies are right there for your convenience. The Neckar Valley is less than an hour to the south... well, provided traffic cooperates, which it often doesn't...

There are regional train connections via Mainz to Mannheim that take from about 2h45m with one change in Mainz to 1h45m with multiple changes. With a Rheinland-Pfalz-Ticket you can make that trip for 22€ for the first person, 4€ each for 1-4 additional persons. You could rent a car in Mannheim or continue on to Ulm with a Baden-Württemberg-Ticket (same price structure). A rail line follows the Neckar to Stuttgart and then a little farther to Plochingen.

One consideration is where you might return the car. Airports often have additional fees, but if you were flying out of Frankfurt, it may offset a fee to return to a different location. Otherwise, consider taking a train to a point that makes sense to both pickup and return to.

Thanks for all the good suggestions. We arrive at Frankfurt and fly out of Vienna. We'll take the train to Bacharach and pickup the car after that. We plan to use it for about the next six to eight days touring through the Neckar Valley area, to Nuremberg, down to the Bavaria/Tirol area between GaP to Bodensee, where we will drop it off and take the train to Lucerne (though we're still kicking around the possibility of keeping the car for that period). After a few days in Switzerland, we go to Munich then finally Salzburg and Vienna. I know the scheduling of Munich is a bit odd but we are doing our best to avoid Oktoberfest. We'll be there during the week after that tribute to German yogurt. I suppose we could go back to the Frankfurt airport after Bacharach, or take the train to Mannheim or even Heidelberg. But as sightseeing is the point for the car rental, we thought it might make sense to drive down the east side, through Bensheim, Weinheim, cutting over towards Mosbach. Never been there before so maybe it would be better to just take the train to Mannheim as suggested. I'm open to suggestions and listening.

"I suppose we could go back to the Frankfurt airport after Bacharach, or take the train to Mannheim or even Heidelberg. But as sightseeing is the point for the car rental, we thought it might make sense to drive down the east side, through Bensheim, Weinheim, cutting over towards Mosbach." It's possible to sightsee along the north-south train line that serves these towns as well. And both of you can enjoy the sights without the driving duties. Hop off for an hour, hop back on. There are 16 stops between Darmstadt and Heidelberg Hbf. (connect in H'berg for trains to Mosbach.) Copy and paste to see train stops: http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/traininfo.exe/en/38922/132146/74756/24404/80?ld=96243&seqnr=2&ident=kz.030955243.1371768623&date=21.06.13&station_evaId=8000068&station_type=dep¤tReferrer=tp&rt=1& I would definitely get off the train (or park the car) in Ladenburg, an extremely handsome town with some very fine buildings, old town walls, and nice market square with cafes.

Airport and Railway station pick-up stations charge an extra 19% service fee. So whatever your total rental fee is if you picked up the car at either one of those they will add those almost 20%. Which car rental company are you renting with? E.g. Sixt has got a station right by the "Konstablerwache" S-Bahn station in downtown Frankfurt. It's totally easy to get there but there will not be the extra charge. But depending on car rental provider such stations exist in Mainz, Wiesbaden etc. as well.

We will most likely deal with Bob Bestor as that's worked very well for us in the past. And as there are only two of us, and the price of gasoline is so much higher than even in California, we'll be renting a small car. A small fly in the ointment right now is that it looks like we'll be picking the car up on a Saturday.