14 days in Germany

We just returned from a 3 week trip to Germany and one of the highlights of our trip was our visit to Quedlinburg and Wernigerode in the Harz district.

The medievel old town of Quedlinburg was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 and is one of the best-preserved medieval and renaissance towns in Europe. Wernigerode is much the same but in it's own unique way.

Quedlinburg is located about half way between Berlin and Frankfurt.

We also enjoyed Bamberg, Germany, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Actually, we enjoyed every place we visited on this trip. Germany is a country we never tire of.

Here are some of our photos if you are interested:

http://travel.webshots.com/album/575000387NPlKyZ?start=120

Also, my trip report:

http://www.fodors.com/community/europe/our-sensational-september-trip-to-germany-austria.cfm

There is so much around Berlin, that you might want to stay there a bit longer. Quedlinburg as mentioned above, Luebeck, Potsdam of course, and you might want to plan a visit to Sachsenhausen.

Bike tours would be fun to do in Berlin and in Munich. Try some themed walking tours too, like a 3rd Reich tour or a Cold War tour. Bike or walking tours in themselves will give you a good orientation of whatever city you are in, excellent history info presented in a manner that is way different and far more interesting than reading it out of a book, and also good tips for other places to go and see, or restaurants.

All 3 of your main cities have lots of museums and interesting architecture. Since you are coming in the summer months, you will also be able to go to a variety of fests, which move into full swing around May.

Hi jj,

Have you looked up Germany under "Destinations"?

How many guide books have you read?

As you can see from all the trip reports on this site, it is not that hard to plan the trip yourself and have a good time. You have travelled internationally before, and even if it was with a group, you know quite a bit already about how to travel abroad.

With the advent of the internet, it is so much easier to get information and make contact with hotels than it used to be.

We just got back from 2 weeks in Berlin, Prague, Gorlitz, Dresen and Leipzig. We loved Berlin - so much to see and so much history. Be sure to take Berlin Walks World War II tour if you're into that period of history. It was excellent. My daughter and I took Fat Tire Bike tour in Amsterdam and Paris last year and it was so much fun - I know they have a branch in Berlin.

Dresden has the most beautiful building as does Leipzig. Except for Berlin, our favorite was Gorlitz which is the Eastern most city in Germany - a bridge away from Poland.

Have a great time in Germany - my new favorite country.

Always been my old favorite country, just a "little" more freedom would be nice, maybe now with the new government?

What "freedom" are you lacking?

Our last trip to Germany included Passau, Bamberg, Bayreuth, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, and Lubeck. Loved them all -- for different reasons probably. Used trains everywhere. I don't think you can go wrong in Germany. We have also visited Munich, Rothenburg, Cologne, and Mainz. All interesting.

First of all: Your very first paragraph sounds wonderful! Congrats you show your son the world which definitely opens minds! Best education of all!

Now - you don't need to do tours with group. The infrastructure is fantastic and so you can arrange all the travel yourself perfectly!

The choice is yours:

Do either a trip which is focused on to cities (like Munich, Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne) or do a mixture of e.g. Munich, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt or maybe Cologne with some Rhine valleys where hiking is wonderful.

Go ahead and plan youself! Go for it!

Happy Planning!

SV

Logos - the "freedom" you mean particularly in regard to the new government will be only for the rich and paid for by the low income

Spassvogel, it's the other way around. The low income don't have anything they can give, so they don't pay a thing. The get subsidized by all the rest.

Schäuble is where he can't hurt anymore. The new justice minister is the best we could get and the ministry of health is run by a doctor now. I do look forward to a flat tax, so it's worth working again and people don't avoid paying taxes at all.
I do hope for more freedom and less communism.

Guido as foreign minister is a joke, but a good one.

And for all the tourists, tax reductions are REAL too.

From Jan 1st 2010, taxes on lodging and restaurants will GO DOWN from 19% now to 7% then. Cheaper or better hotel rooms for everyone!

And all nuclear weapons out of Germany.

>Schäuble is where he can't hurt anymore.

Not only that - if he is auditing the finance proceedings with the zeal he had before concerning citizens' private lives, I can imagine reducing taxes and getting a tax surplus at the same time

Frankfurt would be extremely low on my choice of places to visit in Germany. You might want to end up there on your last night to make airport access easy, but I would not make it a destination city for sightseeing. There isn't anything particularly wrong with Frankfurt, it's just that there a lot more interesting places to visit.

Depends on what you think is interesting doesn't it?
Maybe they like medieval churches, or lots of museums and art, perhaps they are interested in the part Frankfurt played in Germanys history, maybe they are interested in the rich history of Frankfurts Jewish community, maybe they like turn of the century architecture that Frankfurt is covered with, maybe they even like skyscrapers, or they want to go to some of the cultural events that are here in our beautiful opera house.

Besides that, Frankfurt is a great base for many of the smaller towns that are nice for day trips.

logos
health care contribution frozen for employers, 150€ for a mother who keeps the child at home instead letting him learn social and other skills at the kindergarten (now more children without having the slightest education will stop others from learning because of their lack of education/gap compared to the others), child allowance is going to increase making it more attractive to the wrong people to reproduce themselves means supporting their life without working - Sarazin is right in most of his statements as STERN confirmed last week!), nuclear plants are going to run longer meaning a money printing mashinery for REW, EON and the like despite the waste hasn't been sorted out and not to mention the safety and security, employers will be excepted from contributing to nursing care insurance etc etc etc
It's liberal politics - nothing more but nothing less.
More freedom here means: people must pay for more out of their own pockets.

Sorry for hijacking by answering to this topic.

SV

PS
Okay - agree: Schäuble will be of less danger to democracy in his new job.

Can't health care contributions go down? Rather sooner than later it'll be tax funded anyway. If you want to redistribute one persons income to others, there's the imcome tax for that. It's all we need. They also said that energy companies must be split if the abuse their market power. And of course Sarazin is right, you're just not allowed to say that in public.

More freedom also means: I don't have to work more and more every year to feed the poor. Who wants to work more so others he doesn't even know can stay home?

And how many people in government are fed from our (my) money doing things that aren't needed. How many health insurance companies that are all the same, same price, same benefits, do we have? We have an institution to collect TV tax, why, totally not needed? We have a zillion people in the public sector that do nothing anybody needs anyway. They need to be send home. And the we can easily finance more and better kindergartens.

One of the very few philosophers, that tells it like it is, is Peter Sloterdjk. People have allowed the state to take away the fruits of their work like never before. The state keeps most of it to finance unneded things, to finance a legion of civil servants and accumulates debt which the citizen are forced to pay for, like it was their own debt. In any society that existed before, the result would be a revolution and a destruction of the existing political system.

People today are conditioned from their birth to accept this debt and servitude as theirs and accept to be enslaved by the state without questioning the system.

imho, this is so true...

Yes, I am sure there are people who would enjoy Frankfurt very much--as I said, there is nothing particularly wrong with Frankfurt.

And I am sure that there are visitors to the USA who would enjoy Omaha, Nebraska or Detroit, Michigan very much. But, overall, I wouldn't recommend these cities as prime destinations for tourists to the USA with only 2 weeks at their disposal.

I'd still put Frankfurt way down on my list of places to visit when prioritizing a trip to Germany. Though I must say that I enjoyed visiting the Holocaust memorial wood near the airport.

Well, except that I don't think Omaha or Detroit have any medieval churchs in them, nor ghetto walls from 1180, nor guard towers from their defensive walls that were built in 1425, nor did they kill half of their Jewish citizens and then decide to build a memorial to them, nor did they have any coronations going on in Iowa or Michigan the last time I checked and the Romans certainly didn't visit there either. Did you know that Frankfurt was the Passion Play center? That the script for the Oberammergau play came from here?

Comparing those cities with Frankfurt is a tad lame. What I see when I open most guidebooks is that most of them could use some help to find the fascinating things about Frankfurt. We may not have huge tourist attractions like the Mona Lisa or the Eiffel Tower, but most people do enjoy visiting the Teutonic Order of Knights church which was built in 1309, if they know about it. Try finding it in a guidebook though. Did you know that our city archives are in an old cloister and that they contain the largest wall paintings north of the Alps and that they were painted in 1513? Have you visited St. Leonhards to see the "hanging vault" in there? You can't see this any place else cause this is the only one. Even tourists in the 1700's came here to see this.

There is a ton of stuff here that is simply not on the tourist radar. It is just accepted that there is nothing here to see and no one has bothered to see if this is really the case. This is one of the reasons I come on here, to tell people that there ARE beautiful, historic sites here. That many of the exhibits in the museums are world class and definetly worth visiting. If folks would stop writing Frankfurt off and spend a few days here, then they would discover some of this.

Since you are flying into Berlin and out of Frankfurt, and have been to Munich before, I would suggest Berlin, Dresden, Bamberg, Wuerzburg, Rhine, last afternoon / overnight in Franfurt or Mainz.

This itinerary may seem a little too full, but you don't have to spend days and days in, say, Wuerzburg. You could just visit the Residenz there and move on. But don't miss the Residenz. One of Europe's best palaces. Really.

I will add that if you had a car for the Bamberg - Wuerzburg segment, a trip to Rothenburg would be very easy. It's doable by train, but complicated and time-consuming. Some people love it; some people hate it. If you're there when the tour buses are not, it's really pretty atmospheric.

A car on this segment would also make Vierzehnheiligen possible.

16 year old son .... I'm thinking a side trip to Sindelfingen (by Stuttgart) to visit Daimler Benz .... Porsche is close by too - not sure what tours may be available, but worth checking it out

But Omaha does have the longest pedestrian bridge linking two states, Boys Town, El Museo Latino, a Navy Museum, the Gerald Ford birth site, the Malcolm X birth site, the General Crook house, the oldest bank in Nebraska, Nebraska's biggest art museum, the Kenefick Park locomotive display, Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail, the Mormon Trail Center, Nebraska Jewish Historical Society and Riekes Museum, the Omaha Children's Museum--well, just too much to list here.

But I'll still put Omaha below a few other travel destinations in the USA.

Thanks all. So much to see and not enough time. My son is very interested in seeing the Porsche factory near Stuttgart as suggested by seafox. He would love to visit Audi in Ingolstadt. I guess that is close to Munich. Anyone know much about that place? anything else interesting in Ingolstadt?
We are looking at the following cities/towns:
Berlin - 5 days (includes day trips to Dresden and Potsam)
Nuremberg - 1 day
Munich - 3 days (includes day trip to Ingolstadt)
Nördlingen and then Dinkelsbühl - 1 day
Stuttgart - 1 day
Rothenburg - 2 days
Heidelberg - 2 days
Cologne - 2 days
Frankfurt - 2 days

This was the second go around with my itinerary. I cut it down to 19 days. I am hopping to shave another 4 days. I might have to cut Cologne, Nördlingen and Dinkelsbühl and then cut one more day.

We will be traveling via train everywhere. Is it pretty easy to get to these places via train?

Ingolstadt is within commuting distance from Munich. To visit the factory, you have to take the train to "Ingolstadt Nord" station. There's a bus from there. Downtown is nice but nothing special. The factory is HUGE and the new visitors center is about 2 blocks from the main entrance.

Most places you want to go are easily accessible by train.
Rothenburg, Dinkelsbühl, and Nördlingen might be a bit more time-consuming.

Heidelberg/Frankfurt -- either/or, and day trip to the other.
2 days in Rothenburg are a bit too much IMO.
The new part of the Deutsches Museum in Munich which focuses on transport (cars, trains, subways, etc) is also an interesting addition to the museums here. And the new BMW museum, of course.

Since you plan to leave from Frankfurt, you could fly Berlin-Munich.
The only other major attraction of Ingolstadt is an outlet shopping center, but I guess that does not count for your guys

You can easily get to Frankfurt airport from Heidelberg by shuttle or train and that is where I would opt to stay instead of staying in Frankfurt at the end of the trip. Take those two days and add one to Munich and one to Nuremberg.

From Nuremberg you can visit Regensburg and from Munich there are many wonderful options for daytrips: Garmisch, Mittenwald, Salzburg and many more.

You are doing too much moving around in my view when some of these cities are easily visited as day trips without the need to change hotels.

I do agree that you need to study some guidebooks as well as map and also use banh.de to plan your routes by public transport.

We love Germany and choose to use public transport when we visit. We are headed to Berlin in 24 days and have 12 nights in Germany. As we usually do, we plan to base in three cities and make day trips to maximize enjoyment and limit time lost in moving hotels.

Kfusto and all-

We are tentatively planning 12ish days in Germany from 26/12 to 6/01. Berlin is the focus and then hoping to do 2-3 other places. I've been to Munich + surrounding in the summer before but travel mate has never been anywhere in Germany. Do the typical highlights do as well in the Winter? Are there cities that are better winter destinations than others? Would be interested to hear from anyone with experience before we get too set into a plan. We are intersted in museums, architecture, history (WW2 tours), and being outside (Mike's Bikes and Fat Tire as well as any walking tour recommended are our typical day one in any city) to just take it all in! Also wine! Anyone visited wine regions in the winter?

Thanks!

We plan on spending about 4 days in Berlin, maybe a couple days in Munich (so we can visit the museums and walk around the city). Perhaps a couple of days in Frankfurt. Where else should we visit and for how long? What is the best route? should we travel by train or air?>

German trains are tops - some go nearly 200mph - i'd take the traina and see the lay of Germany in between the big cities. I have traveled on trains in Germany for decades and always marvel at how nice they are (compared to Amtrak it don't take much but German trains are modern, fast and fairly punctual - two ICE (InterContinentalExpress) trains an hour between nearly all main cities so you can just show up at the station and hop the next train. Two alternatives: Consider the German Twin Railpass (two names on one pass - cheaper than two individual passes) which allows fully flexible just show up travel to hop on any train or you can do the online discount fares (act well in advance however to get the best ones) at www.bahn.de - the German Railways web portal - you can often score 39 euro train-specific (i think), non-changeable (i think), non-rrefundable (i think) fares so if you want to lock yourself in that could be the cheapest way to go. I love flexibility to just get up and get to the station on my own time and hop the next train and for these types of fares as you can see on bahn.de they are very expensive and even a few long train trips, like you envision can make the pass pay off. For lots on German trains, in addition to the www.bahn.de site i always recommend these info-laden sites: http://www.budgeteuropetravel.com/id9.html; www.seat61.com; www.ricksteves.com; www.euraide.com.

My last two trips to Germany and Austria have been in late November and early December. We go for the markets, though more for the ambiance of the markets themselves than the shopping etc. We enjoy strolling the streets with a hot mug of gluhwein, stopping for a bite, listening to carolers, etc.

We leave on the day before Thanksgiving for our next trip.

Last year we went to Salzburg, Vienna and Munich and did great daytrips from Salzburg and Munich into the alps. Stunning scenery and markets everywhere with music and festivities. I did a similar trip the year before to Salzburg and Munich. This year we start with 4 days in Berlin then we are taking a 5 night river cruise to Bamberg, Wurzburg, Nuremberg and a few other small towns then ending with a few days in Munich.

We are visiting Dresden for a day from Berlin and Regensburg and Mittenwald from Munich.

I agree that the trains are superb! We buy a Selectpass for first class train travel, 5 or 8 days and love the flexibility. We can change our plans due to weather or anything else and just jump on a train. While one can save a bit on advance purchase tickets, these do not allow changes. We prefer to be flexible as our time is valuable.

And there is a special 20% off on German Railpasses if bought before this Nov 20 (2009) and then you must activate it only within six months after issue - meaning you can travel with the pass for seven months after issue

For a 4-day Twin flexipass (four unlimited travel days over a one-month period) costs $156 p.p. in 2nd class and $208 in first class

For solo passes it's $214 and $271 p.p. on the special

So with the 4-day 2nd class Twin pass that would be less than $40 a day or about 25 euros a day - cheaper than the online discounted fares for most journeys and fully flexible!

the special is in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall and i think you also get some kind of free Berlin Sightseeing Tour.

And yes, checking the RailEurope site the 20% discounted pass even includes a free Berlin City Sightseeing Tour via a double-decker bus that circulates around town and you can get on and off all day long (i think)

You could stay in Nuremberg 2 nights: 1 day for Nuremberg and then take a daytrip to Rothenburg via train. Nuremberg has a day-pass for the trains which covers Rothenburg that's dirt cheap -- hopefully someone who's been there recently can pipe up.

You may also want to trim Heidelberg to one day, too. Or, stay 2 nights and take a daytrip to Bad Wimpfen (great little town with incredible half-timbered architecture) or Speyer, for its beautiful cathedral.

Gute Reise!