After having just completed our trip to Italy, we felt that we now wanted to plan another land trip to quieter parts of Europe. We really enjoyed the peaceful time we spent in Varenna, on Lake Como, and that made us think about another trip while we were in Italy, possibly heading up into the Alps from northern Italy. When we first discussed this trip, we though about flying into Milan and heading north from there, but after looking at the potential destinations, that starting point no longer fit into the overall route.
We really enjoyed the places we visited in Italy, but many of those have lost their charm, they are too popular with tourists now, as compared to ten years ago. We constantly found ourselves saying “how can people enjoy being here in the peak of the summer, it is way too crowded now, and it is the off season”. We realized that we need to explore smaller, less visited places, and thought that planning a trip to the Alps in Switzerland, Italy and Austria might be the solution to finding quieter places to visit.
We will still be visiting some larger cities and those may be crowded, but hopefully not as popular or crowded as the places we visited in Italy.
We want to get a start on planning this trip much farther out than we did for the 2019 Italy Trip. Because we started so late to plan that trip, we felt that there were less choices for accommodations, and that the airfare was ridiculously high because many of the cheaper seats were already sold. As an example, looking out to September, 2020, airfare to Europe and back is several hundred dollars less than we paid for Italy. At least we can monitor the pricing for a while before we have to commit.
We will plan for this trip to be from mid-September to early October, 2020, knowing it will be cooler at the higher altitudes of the Alps, so we need to go a little earlier in September than we normally plan. The preliminary plan, subject to change of course, is to fly into Zurich, Switzerland, and fly home from Munich, Germany. Hopefully the Munich flights will not be too impacted by Octoberfest, which is from September 19 to October 4, 2020.