We are will be in Oberammageu, Germany in September. Our group consist of 2 couples and 2 singles. We have booked an appartment in the village for a week and plan to make day-trips from there. Should we plan to rent a car or use the train? We would like to be able to see sights along the Romantic Road and even go in to Austria but will we miss the narrative that a tour would provide? What do you recommend?
Definitely rental car if you don't want to spend the best portion of your days waiting at some train stations for connecting trains. Make sure you rent a 7 seater! Best German agencies: Sixt.com, Europcar.com but also brokers like m-broker, auto europe or gemut.com, holidayautos.com,...
I would assume that you left the 's' off of couples, and you don't mean 2 (couple) plus 2 singles. Six people! Two Bayern (Länder) tickets will still be only be €56 per day, probably less than fuel for a 6 passenger vehicle. Unless you plan on taking the train to Oberammergau and then going somewhere (like Garmisch-Partenkirchen?) to rent the car, you will need a vehicle from the airport big enough not only for six people, but also for all of your luggage.
BTW, I am thinking of being in that same area about the same time with five people, and we will exclusively use the train (and maybe buses) and save a fortune vs. renting a vehicle. There is a bus that goes from Oberammergau to Hohenschwangau (site of the castles).
Just to clarify what Steve said about "Lander" tickets. First, the German word for a state is Land. The plural of Land is Länder, pronounced more like Lender. The Germans call these all day passes for regional trains a "states ticket" (Länder-ticket). Each state issues their own, and they are not all €28. They range from €26 for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and €27 for Brandenburg-Berlin to €31 for Hessen and €35 for the SchönesTagTicket (Nordrhein-Westfalen, around Köln).