My husband and I went for 3 months Sept - Dec 2004. as for Oktoberfest, we went on the first day, didnt have reservations and couldnt get a seat in the tents, so even if you have a hotel reservation already, I would look into making a table reservation for the tents. We ended up leaving and going to a beirgarten where we met some locals and had a blast anyway, but it kinda stunk that we couldnt drink in the tents
We spent 100 days, traveling on trains except for flying to Greece and Warsaw. I found a really cheap flight from Berlin to Athens, so that just beat the heck out of taking the long train ride or the boat. We took overnight trains from Austria to Venice, from Rome to Nice, Nice to Barcelona, and a sleeper from Madrid to Paris. The sleeper was expensive on top of our rail pass. Actually, I found that the rail pass wasn't the greatest in Spain.
I planned our route in a more or less clockwise direction, starting at Belgium (loved Bruges) then to Amsterdam, Cologne, Munich (for Ocktoberfest), Southern Bavaria and the Rhine, then back to hit Alsace and strasbourg france (since we had to sort of hurry to make it to Munich on time, then Lucerne, Interlaken and Gimmelwald (loved Gimmelwald and will always treasure that little extra money that I spent on a paraglide trip over Interlaken), then on to Berlin, (fly to greece where we saw Athens, Mykonos, and one other place on the penninsula), fly back to berlin, on to salzburg and vienna, prague, back to vienna to get a train out to Budapest since we couldnt use our rail pass to go straight through from prague to budapest, then back to vienna after budapest. flew from vienna to warsaw - which I would not recommend seeing at all, but we met some family in Koln that wanted to show us warsaw. Then on to italy (venice, rome and florence, and perugia), nice, spain (madrid, seville and barcelona), and back up to paris and finally london.
I thought it was a great time to travel because the crowds were minimal. The weather was pretty great for the most part. We had a cold time of it in venice, because a storm hit, but venice was still amazing, paris and london and perugia were also cold by the time we got there, but not crowded.
overall, we hit all the biggies and some of the small places (I like small towns and nature) and it didnt often feel rushed. if I had to do it again I would probably do the same, except less time in athens (just like one day to see the parthenon then I would get out because I hated it there), probably skip lucerne and warsaw, and plan ocktoberfest better. the extra days from cutting those places, I would give to Gimmelwald and rome (since we were not there long enough)\
oh and I cut Portugal, Ireland, and Scandanavia early on because they (along with Greece) were just too far and I decided that we could only feasibly do one of those four without burning too much travel time.
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