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Trips Examples

Trip Builder Example Mobile Trip Profile

Below are a few of our past trips showing what we planned and completed as independent travelers. Each example is also linked to the actual Public Trip Profile so you can see what the trip looks like when viewed in the Trip Builder.

When planning a trip on your own, you avoid the constraints of pre-planned, time-boxed tour group schedules. You can be flexible on where you go, what you do and how long you stay. Utilizing the Trip Builder, we easily organized and planned our entire trip while the Mobile Trip Profile guided us during your travels, every step of the way.

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From				To	Nights
	Denver	-	-	London	1
	London	-	-	Windsor	1
	Windsor	-	-	York	1
	York	-	-	Edinburgh	3
		-	-	Rosslyn Chapel	-
		-	-	Royal Yacht Britannia	-
	Edinburgh	-	-	Anstruther	1
		-	-	Isle of May	-
	Anstruther	-	-	St. Andrews Cathedral	-
		-	-	Dunnottar Castle	-
		-	-	Balvenie Castle	-
		-	-	Glenfiddich Distillary	-
		-	-	Speyside Cooperage	-
		-	-	Elgin Cathedral	-
		-	-	Culloden Viaduct	-
		-	-	Inverness	1
	Inverness	-	-	Drumnadrochit (Loch Ness)	1
	Drumnadrochit	-	-	Urquhart Castle (Loch Ness)	-
		-	-	Loch Ness Cruise	-
		-	-	Eilean Donan Castle	-
		-	-	Fort Augustus (Canal Locks)	-
		-	-	Glengarry Castle (Hotel)	1
	Glengarry	-	-	Commando Memorial	-
		-	-	Castle Stalker	-
		-	-	Kilchurn Castle	-
		-	-	Highland Cows	-
		-	-	Falkirk (Wheel & Kelpies)	-
		-	-	Glasgow	1
	Glasgow	-	-	London	1
	London	-	-	Denver	-

					12

May 2019

England & Scotland

This trip profile shows a complete trip displaying booking details, dates and pre-trip photos. Costs and pre-trip notes have been hidden.

We flew from Denver to London, where we hired a 5-Star Taxi to Windsor where we stayed for the night. (There are several private taxi services available from London Heathrow that are much cheaper than taking a traditional Black Cab.)

Departing Windsor the next day, we broke up our travel day to Edinburgh Scotland by stopping midway in York for the night. We departed the next morning for Edinburgh.

In Edinburgh, we toured the town and castle. One day, we took two bus rides, one to see Rosslyn Chapel and the other to see the Royal Yacht Britannia.

After three nights in Edinburgh, we rented a car, as you really need a car to get around Scotland to see the sites. (We took an early morning bus to the airport to rent our car. It's much more convenient and there are more options when renting from the airport than places in the city.)

We drove to Anstruther where we had scheduled a boat trip to the Isle of May later in the afternoon. From there, we continued around Scotland counterclockwise to Inverness, Drumnadrochit at Loch Ness and finally back to Glasgow.

You can see from our itinerary, the places we stayed each night and the stops we made each leg of our journey.

Most of our stops were not accessible by train so it was essential to have a car. Having a car made it easy to secure our backpacks when we stopped to tour the different sites. Other than our first night in Windsor and our last night in London where we dropped off our packs early at our B&B/Hotel, we never had to leave our packs at other hotels prior to checkin, or use train stations storage lockers to secure them while we went off and explore. (In the UK, you will not find the train station storage lockers as you would throughout other parts of Europe. We were told that this was due to the IRA in the past placing bombs in them. This is the same reason you may not find large trash cans placed around the train stations.)

We try to stay somewhere special at least once on every trip. On this trip, we stayed the night at the Glengarry Castle Hotel, which was one of the highlights of our trip.

On our last full day in Scotland we made several stops on our way back to the Glasgow airport to return our car. We arrived in Glasgow in the evening and had a nice dinner before boarding our Sleeper Train back to London.

We planned our trip to arrive in the morning in London where we had one last full day to see some of the city sites. The next day, we boarded our flight back to the States.

It's important to note that with all we had planned, even on days where there were several stops, we had plenty of time and did not feel rushed. We planned the itinerary so we had short travel times between sites and were not wasting an entire day in the car. This was an aggressive schedule, but everything worked out exactly as planned. We left some places early in the morning and arrived at some destinations in the evening, always before dark. We also used the Travel Planner that really helped us stay on track and keep to our schedule.

From				To		Nights
	Denver	-	-		Paris	1
	Paris	-	-		Strasbourg	1
	Strasbourg	-	-		Bern	1
	Bern	-	-		Thun	-
		-	-		Thun (Oberhofen Castle)	-
	Thun	-	-		Spiez	-
	Spiez	-	-		Interlaken	1
	Interlaken	-	-		Grindelwald	2
		-	-		Grindelwald First	-
	Grindelwald	-	-		Lauterbrunnen	-
		-	-		Grutschalp	-
		-	-		Murren	-
		-	-		Schilthorn & Birg	-
		-	-		Gimmelwald	-
		-	-		Stechelberg	-
		-	-		Trummelbach	-
		-	-		Lauterbrunnen	-
		-	-		Wengen	-
		-	-		Kleine Scheidegg	-
		-	-		Grindelwald	-
	Grindelwald	-	-		Zermatt	1
		-	-		Zermatt (Gornergrat)	-
		-	-		Zermatt (Gorner Gorge)	-
	Zermatt	-	-		Sion	-
		-	-		Sion (Tourbillon & Valere)	-
	Sion	-	-		Montreux	-
		-	-		Montreux (Chillon Castle)	-
		-	-		Montreux	-
	Montreux	-	-		Lausanne	1
	Lausanne	-	-		Lyon	1
	Lyon	-	-		Dijon	1
	Dijon	-	-		Paris	3
		-	-		Chartres	-
	Paris	-	-		Denver	-

					Jungfrau Region	13

October 2018

France & Switzerland

This trip profile shows a complete trip displaying dates, pre-trip photos and comments. Booking details and costs have been hidden.

On this two-week trip we flew on Norwegian Air from Denver to Paris. This trip was primarily to visit Strasbourg in the Alsace area of France, then continue on to the Jungfrau region of Switzerland before heading back to some other locations in France.

As we flew into Paris, the most convenient way to get to Strasbourg is by high speed train, taking about an hour and a half. We also broke up the next day's travel by stopping in Bern for a night before heading to Interlaken. After Interlaken, we proceeded to several places in the Jungfrau area of Switzerland before heading to Zermatt to see the town and the Matterhorn. Departing Zermatt, we had other stops in Switzerland before continuing on our travel loop to Lyon, Dijon and finally back to Paris for a few days.

As we always do, we only carried our 40L Backpacks. These packs meet airline size requirements for carry-on luggage, so we never have to check them. (Just a note, when our bags were fully packed, they weighed approximately 15-17 pounds, so not heavy to carry around.)

Some days had multiple transportation legs with several different stops, so traveling with only a backpack made it very easy. At several locations, we were able to drop off our packs at the hotel early, or utilized the convenient train station storage lockers to secure our backpacks while we went off to explore the town.

For example, in Switzerland we arrived in Thun from Bern in the early morning. We placed our packs in the storage lockers at the train station before heading out to walk around the town and see Thun Castle. We also took a bus to visit Oberhofen Castle before heading back to collect our packs and board our cruise across Lake Thun to Spiez. We kept our packs with us in Spiez and walked to the train station, where we boarded the train to our final destination of Interlaken for the night.

From				To	Nights
	Denver	-	-	Reykjavik	2
	Reykjavik	-	-	Frankfurt	-
	Frankfurt	-	-	Liebenstein Castle	1
	Liebenstein Castle	-	-	Marksburg Castle	-
		-	-	Thurant Castle	-
		-	-	Eltz Castle	-
		-	-	Cochem Castle	-
		-	-	Trier	1
	Trier	-	-	Vianden Castle	-
		-	-	Bourscheid Castle	-
		-	-	Metz	1
	Metz	-	-	Colmar	1
	Colmar	-	-	Trieburg	-
		-	-	Hornberg	-
		-	-	Stuttgart	1
	Stuttgart	-	-	Lichtenstein Castle	-
		-	-	Munich	1
	Munich	-	-	Salzburg	2
		-	-	Eagle's Nest	-
		-	-	Berchtesgaden	-
	Salzburg	-	-	Rothenburg	2
	Rothenburg	-	-	Heidelberg	1
	Heidelberg	-	-	Frankfurt	-
	Frankfurt	-	-	Denver	-

					13

October 2017

Iceland, Germany, Luxembourg, France & Austria

This trip profile is in the planning process highlighting how a profile can be set to limit the information displayed. Only the basic location and activity information is shown. Bookings are still incomplete and a profile password has been set.

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The focus of this trip involved several different stops in multiple countries. The first week involved traveling by car while the second was by train.

As a bonus, we found a flight deal allowing us to stay a couple of nights in Reykjavik Iceland on the way, before arriving in Frankfurt Germany.

We would spend a night in a castle on the Rhine River, drive the Mosel River Valley with several castle stops, tour some castles in Luxembourg, stay in Colmar in the Alsace area of France, make several stops in Germany's Black Forrest, visit Oktoberfest in Munich, head to Strasbourg Austria and see Hitler's Eagle's Nest, stop in Rothenburg and finally Heidelberg.

With the exception of a couple days, we planned each day's travel to be broken up into several short drives between each destination, so it never felt like we wasted an entire day traveling. We also planned our trip so that we were always driving during the day, arriving at each final day's destination in the early evening. This made it much easier to navigate and find parking by our accommodations that night.

The trip worked out great but looking back, we would have liked to have had a little more time in Trier. We arrived late in the evening, just before dark and most sites were already closed. We had time in the morning to see a few places but had to depart early to our next destination. We did not see much of Stuttgart, but that was our plan. We only stayed the night then drove to see the Lichtenstein Castle in the morning before returning to drop off our car at the train station, then board a high speed train to Munich.

After Munich and attending Oktoberfest, we were on to Salzburg for a couple nights before returning to one of our favorite German towns, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Our last stop was the town of Heidelberg before we returned home.