Hi Everyone,

My husband and I are planning our first big trip together and we have chosen these three countries to see. I know it's a lot in a short amount of time, but who knows when we'll have a chance to go back to explore? We definately want to see Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and Barcelona. We're heard wonderful things about Bilbao and San Sebastian as well. My questions are: Can we use the Eurail selectpass to travel between the countries or is it better to just buy a ticket each time? Also, need advice on itenerary for these three countries. I think best flight price was from San Francisco to Rome and home from Barcelona. Any other suggestions of where to start, end or anything in between? We know we're seeing the busiest, craziest cities but we'd like a little R and R inbetween. Any advice/suggestions welcome. Budget is anything reasonable - some nicer hostels to nice hotels inbetween. Thanks!

It is hard to decide whether to use a rail pass until you know your itinerary. We were in Italy for three weeks a couple of years ago and after some pretty serious math discovered that, because of the time involved and the days we would be traveling it was less expensive to just buy the tickets as we went along. Good luck.

Thanks for your response. Do you know a good website in English that gives prices for single trips?

Sorry, I don't know websites for Spain. You should probably do a google...rail schedules Spain....or some such. Also try the Eurail site and see what they have to offer.

www.raileurope.com

On the above homepage look for a red banner with white lettering: "Most Popular Rail Passes and Tickets".
In the third column click on "tickets" to get an idea of individual ticket prices compared to cost of Eurail selectpass.

The Spanish rail site www.renfe.es is hugely tricky, you have to know your geography, it is partly divided by region, also by types of trains etc. To get times )but not fares) you better research it at

http://plannerint.b-rail.be/bin/quer...p;L=profi&

which is great for all of Europe.

To get a handle on tickets-versus-passes, go to

www.railwaver.com and use the third of the options on the left of the second screen, "Only if railpasses save me money". You'll then get a good sense of the worth or otherwise of passes.

There's a good descripton of different pass options, and also a handy, rough-but-quite-accurate fare estimator, at the rail passes section of

www.ricksteves.com

For French trains go to www.voyages-sncf.fr but don't expect to see fares more than either 60 or 90 days in the future -pick a closer date if it's just for the fare, they don't change throughout the year. Now when it gets closer to your trip dates you may get "Prems" - advance discount fares, so if you look too early you won't see them, but you'll see some for the earlier dummy dates you'll input.

For Italy it's www.trenitalia.it, and they don't show fares for more than 60 days out.

Oops, that was www.railsaver.com - sorry.

WK