Germany itinerary
 

my family and I are planning a trip to Germany this May. We plan on landing in Hamburg, then getting a rental car and taking our time to drive to dagebüll. In the AM we’ll ferry over to Föhr for a day which we’re visiting for family reasons. Then we want to drive maybe 1-2 hrs max that evening to start the long drive to Berlin. After Berlin we go to Nuremberg, then start the romantic road and end in Munich. We want to make full use of our time but not feel like we’re spending all out time in the car. Open to any suggestions! Someone had told me to ditch the rental in Berlin and take the trains and use Nuremberg and Munich as bases, would that be better?

Day 1: land in Hamburg, drive to dagebüll
Day 2: föhr
Day 3: Berlin
Day 4: Berlin
Day 5: Berlin
Day 6: Berlin, drive to Nuremberg
Day 7: Nuremberg
Day 8: wurzburg (start of romantic road), rothenberg
Day 9: rothenberg, dinkelsbuhl, nordlingen
Day 10: nordlingen, dinauworth or harburg, Augsburg
Day 11: fussen,
Day 12: Munich
Day 13: Munich
Day 14: Munich
Day 15: fly home

Please don't drive straight off a long flight. You may think you are safe but you aren't. Hamburg is a nightmare for driving even without jetlag.
Consider the train instead and pick up a car, if you need it, later. You could easily do without until the Romantic road part of the trip.

I see no advantage to having a car in most of Bavaria. I know they call it the Romantic Road but it doesn't have special scenery, it was just a tourist board in the 1950s that named the road linking some pretty towns. So the cities are good, but the road is irrelevant. You can easily do them by train. You might even find if you take the car back to Hamburg that you can take the train to Berlin, and go from Berlin to Nuremberg by train. There is a lot of good scenery around Füssen though, don't get me wrong, it's not blah by any means.

Also days 9 and 10 are a little crammed. If you really want to fit 3 cities in a car could be helpful there. Rothenburg is in a sort of rail cul-de-sac and hard to get to by train, so that might be another point at which you would find a car useful. Dinkelsbühl is just a short hop away from Rothenburg, and has everything Rothenburg has, minus the tourists.

Lavandula