Hi all of you world travelers. Last November I traveled for the first time abroad to Italy for my daughters wedding (she is in the US Army and and she and her new husband chose to travel to Italy from Kuwait to be married. Your suggestions made my trip fabulous!!! Thank you...

Well my daughter is now stationed in Bamberg, Germany and will be having her first child in February. We are planning a trip to Bamberg but, I don't know which airport we can fly in to from the U.S. We will fly out of Los Angeles, Ca. Any help would again be much appreciated. After I book the flights I will be looking further in to days trips etc we can take while in Bamberg, Thanks again for your help.

Debbie

If you don't want to change flights in Germany, your best bet for a direct flight is to Frankfurt. The closest major airport would be Nuremburg, but it's unlikely that you could fly direct from the USA.

Frankfurt will be fine - it's a major international hub so should be lots of choices & competitive fares. We flew there recently for a trip to Bayreuth since there was no direct Nuremberg flight from Scotland, picked up a hire car and the drive on efficient Germany motorways was easy and even pleasurable !

Fly into Frankfurt and pick up train there. Go to www.bahn.de, the website of the German RR. There is an English language version of it (look for the flag and change it to the British Union Jack).

Enter "Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof" (Frankfurt airport long distance train tation) and "Bamberg Bahnhof". (Bamberg main station). Then pick the train that is most convenient for you.

There are frequent trains. Depending on the type of train, it will take about 2 1/2 to 3 hrs. to get to Bamberg, with a change in Wuerzburg. This is an easy station to change trains.

You also can drive from Frankfurt airport to Bamberg or your family can pick you up. It is not a complicated drive. In your case, I would take the train.

The fare is about EUR54 per person. There are ways to save train fares by taking slower trains, but I wouldn't advise to get into that after a long transatlantic flight with the commensurate jet lag.

You can buy the tickets when you get to Frankfurt.

Here are some fares from DUS to Nuremberg on Air Berlin for really small money. I don't know whether you must fly into FRA or can also disembark in DUS?

http://www.airberlin.com/site/abvaka...N=DUS&NACH=NUE

I used www.kayak.com and found cheapest one stop fares, LAX to Nuremburg, either Northwest (or its partner KLM) through Amsterdam or Delta (or its partner Air France) through Paris. Overall I think that airport is easier in Amsterdam than Paris but if the schedule and fares are better, Paris is fine too. (For random February mid week dates the fare was $740 all in round trip which I would think is pretty good to a non-major Europe airport.)

And I meant to add that round trip fare to Nuremburg was only $25 more expensive than the cheapest round trip to Frankfurt on the same dates.

The drive to Bamberg according to google map would be about 2.5 hours from Frankfurt airport and 1 hour from Nurnberg airport.

"NuremBURG" does not exist, and www.bahn.de won't know it. The city is named NuremBERG. Nürnberg or Nuernberg in German. Just in case anyone wants to google anything. I would not trust a travel agent who cannot even spell the name of the destination.

quokka, not sure anyone here was holding themselves out as a travel agent. I typed "n - u -r" on kayak and it filled in the rest so I didn't even notice the spelling myself. But you are right, including the German spelling alternatives.

We had assumed we'd get the train from Frankfurt to Bayreuth. But 1) it was very expensive and 2) it would have involved 2 changes and 3 hours - so we hired a car which was much cheaper and quicker. even though we didn't expect to use it while we were in Bayreuth. (And this was arriving at 5pm on a Friday, when we thought we might get caught up in the rush hour.)