Following Rick's route Germany & Austria

Thanks for offering help! We are flying into Munich on Feb 15th, We have to spend a few days in Munich because we are picking up a BMW on the 18th at the factory. After that we'll be driving the car till our return on the 25th of Feb. Rick has a itinerary for driving 3 weeks in Germany & Austria. We're thinking of possible doing just the Germany portion.

I generally find Rick's recommendations to be spot-on. We did parts of Germany in September of 2006, roughly following some parts of Rick's suggested routes, with some modifications.

I think you might have a somewhat different experience going in the middle of winter.

You post a pretty general question - can you be a bit more specific about what you are looking for?

I think that Rick's route is great. Just keep in mind that there are many more interesting spots in Germany that he does not cover. He skips northern Germany and most of eastern Germany which are totally different than the Romantic Road and Rhine areas that he seems to favor.

Preliminary plan to spend 3 nights in Munich, drive down and around to Faussen/Reutte (1 night), up through Staufen (1 night), Baden Baden 2, nights, Rhine Valley (Bacharach) 1 night, Wirzburg to romantic road (Rothenburg)1 night last night. Munich plane out 11am 25th. What do you think? Are we trying to cover too much?

Thanks so much for helping us out! We will stay the 2nd to last night in Rothenburg and the final night in Munich.

Here's a practice map from google maps of the trip...

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=12193866992766059419,47.706600,10.033960%3B3240218849785177979,47.853150,9.027330&time=&date=&ttype=&saddr=munich,+germany&daddr=fussen,+germany+to:Reutte,+Austria+to:47.927386,10.15686+to:L194%2FWintersp%C3%BCrer+Stra%C3%9Fe+%4047.853150,+9.027330+to:Staufen+im+Breisgau,+Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald,+Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg,+Germany+to:Baden-Baden,+Germany+to:bacharach,+germany+to:wurzburg+to:rothenburg+ob+der+tauber+to:memmingen+to:munich,+germany&mra=dme&mrcr=2&mrsp=3&sz=8&via=3,4&sll=48.77318,9.625745&sspn=4.735553,8.052979&ie=UTF8&z=8&om=1

Kent,

Thanks for doing that! We are a bit worried that we are cramming too much in, but we werent sure what we would leave out either. If you had to choose to eliminate one of the destinations, which one would you leave out? The drive from Reutte to Staufen is the longest day at about 4.5 hours, assuming we dont get lost, or have bad weather, so either we have to stay two days in Reutte, or just not spend much time there before getting on the road. The car does have Nav, and we arranged to get a Euro disc to load into it. One of the concerns we still need to work out, is if we can drop off the car on Sunday. Before dropping off the car we have to have our rental wheels/tires swapped back to the original set that comes with the car. (It comes with summer performance tires). We arranged to rent wheels and tires from edtires.com, but I am not sure how long this will take. We considered doing all this in the AM of the flight but that is also risky.

thanks...