March 2011 - May 2011 Italy and Germany

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All photos for this trip can be found in our
2011 Italy and Germany Photo Album
Some are also shown in our weekly blogs.

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This two month trip (56 days to be exact) featured rental apartments as we wanted to stay in 3 main places to get a feel for what it is like to live there. Our three main places were Rome (21 days), Munich (10 days) and Berlin (19 days).  We flew from Calgary to Rome via Toronto to get there and Frankfurt direct to Calgary to get back. All our apartments were rented through VRBO and all worked out great.

We elected to travel exclusively by train while in Europe. We bought a Eurail pass which gave us 7 travel days in 3 countries over a two month period which was perfect for us. We had 4 specific travel days to get us to our main target cities so we had 3 days to use for day trips (i.e. we could get somewhere and back in the same day, thereby only using one day on the pass). For those we chose other cities which were about 2 hours or so train ride away (usually on first class high speed trains) to give us around 6 hours for destination sight seeing etc without leaving too early or returning too late. Our choices were Salzburg (from Munich), Hannover (from Berlin) and Dresden (from Berlin).

Here is a basic map of our travels within Europe.

Our weekly blogs are listed below. They are linked to each other so start at week 1 then step through each week or jump to a specific week in this list...

Week 1 Calgary to Rome Italy
Week 2 Rome
Week 3, 4 and 5 Rome to Florence to Munich Germany
Week 6 Munich to Berlin
Week 7 Berlin
Week 8 Berlin
Week 9 Berlin to Frankfurt and back to Calgary