We had a lovely experience when traveling to four cities/countries in Eastern Europe: Berlin, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic; Krakow, Poland; and Budapest, Hungary. Each place was extraordinary and beautiful, full of culture yet charming, and both historic and modern at the same time.
Because the trip was so long and jam packed, I’m going to have to break it into different posts on each city/country. They will probably be a little longer than my usual posts, but filled with tons of memories. As for this post, it’ll be a nice introduction to what’s to come and the planning that went into it.
I started planning this trip around February or so, and I’m glad I started early because it took so much effort to put together. I used the website www.gadventures.com for the skeleton of our journey. This website is really amazing…for single travelers, but when you’re in a group and you’re sharing rooms and getting group discounts, it’s just cheaper (but way more work) to do it yourself.
The trip was from 3-12 July, the flights and trains were all extremely reasonable, kids were in school so it wasn’t overly crowded, and the weather was perfect nearly every day. Our first flight was to Berlin at 1145 and it was a little under 2 hours. We stayed until the 5th, caught a 4.5 hour first class train to Prague, and arrived around 1730. On the 8th we set off to Krakow on our longest day journey. The train was a little under 4 hours and then we immediately got on a bus for another 2.5 hours. We paid extra and got this business class as well. If you’re doing a trip like this, I would highly recommend it since you’ll be stationary for so long. We stayed two full days in Krakow and took an overnight train to Budapest. If you’ve never taken an overnight bunker train before, I’d suggest you not! More into it when I post about Budapest, but it was quite an interesting ride. We ended up having a long delay causing us to arrive around 1030 instead of the intended 0830 (which really messed up our schedule!). Because of a schedule oversight, we only stayed in Budapest for a night, but it was still a lovely time in a beautiful city.
In my next post, I’ll go into detail about how our time was in Berlin. I’ve been to the city before (in May), so I may add pieces of what I did the first time as well.