My son is staying just outside of Venice and we are planning a trip to see him just before Christmas (Dec 23rd) and staying until December 5. We were able to get a good ticket from the US but we had to choose Brussels as our entry into the EU.
After reading the forums, we had the difficult task of determining where we would like to travel after he heads back to work on the 26th. We did do Venice on a prior trip and with so much we haven't seen there were were going to forgo another visit.
As we were staying over New Years I was trying to come up with a great place to stay over New Years for some great and safe evening walks with some fireworks. I was thinking Prague but I'm open to being influenced. We were thinking perhaps of going to Budapest and maybe Vienna along the way.
We have read extensively the train versus car discussion and we were thinking about starting with air travel? Ryanair currently has a flight from Venice to Budapest and then perhaps the train from Budapest to Vienna and on to Prague. I would like to visit Salzburg but I just think that will be too much. Perhaps what I have now is too much.
My wife loves to shop and we were thinking perhaps the Christmas Market may still be open in Vienna. We do like to visit historic places and some museums too. We do know the time of year may affect opening times.
My questions are.
1. Perhaps we should stay in Italy? It would certainly make things easier as we will already hire a car for the trip from the Venice Airport and perhaps hit Milan and Florence with some smaller cities in between. If we did this what is a good New Year stayover point in Italy?
We flew a discount airline (Ryan Air and IT certainly filled our needs but yet all the discussion about car versus train. I do know that our $30 ticket will be $90 with our luggage and a chosen seat
Our planned trip does have an exposure to weather risk and while the airplane and train can mitigate some of that, it won't mean that it won't be so brutally cold that you will want to stay in your hotel anyway. Would an Italy itinerary (especially south of the alps) have a lot less risk?
Gary