14 days in Germany
 

I am planning a 2 week trip to Germany next summer with my 16 year old son.
We travel internationally once a year. I find that this gives us a chance to spend time together while learning about different cultures in other parts of the world.

I am trying to decide where to go and how to get there. We want to get as much out of it as possible, but we won't be driving. In the past we have joined escorted tours. However, I find we definitely don't get the freedom or flexibility that I would like so I decided to try to plan this trip myself (big mistake???)

We were in Munich several years ago and saw three of the main castles and visited the Glockenspiel.

We love architecture, history, culture and museums. That about sums it up. Oh I forgot that we love shopping. We also try to visit any Hard Rock Cafe we can (my son collects the pins).

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? We plan on flying into Berlin and out of Frankfurt.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. It is definitely different planning the entire trip myself. Hopefully it will be our best trip yet.

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/575...lKyZ?start=120

Also, my trip report:

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...ny-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?

((I))

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. :D

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.