"Euro Trip" Topic

My wife and I are looking at a trip to see our son. He is living in Maastricht and assigned to the NATO AWACS squadron in Gielinkirchen. One side of me likes the idea of doing a med cruise. Pluses would be seeing a bunch of places without constantly unpacking and finding a new hotel.
The other option would be to find a hotel in Masstricht and do day trips from there. I would be interested in driving the Market Garden route for instance.

Since this is a spouse thing, visiting battlefields would not be the number 1 priority, but a side trip here and there is not out of the picture either. We looked at the river cruises, but they ran over twice the cost of the med cruises – I am curious what area folks think

Day trips from Maastricht are unlikely to get you far beyond the Netherlands. You could manage Eastern France to Western Germany. Apart from castles etc there aren't many interesting historic military sites outside the Waterloo to WWII periods. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of interesting history but not much was preserved. Look at us Brits, it seems we buried the last English King to die in battle under a car park. Even Jimmy Hoffa got treated better than that.

A good Med cruise could offer much more scope and better weather, Maastricht in the rain is not remotely fun.

Another option could be multi-cities using rail – the dreaded Interrail now has no age limit and allows unlimited travel for a number of days (depending on which pass length is purchased).

Alternatively just buy the journeys you need in advance if you wanted to have a two or three city maxuimum trip. Expands day trips – Brussels is only 80 minutes away for example.

Useful links :

link – Deutsche Bahn has one of the best route finding search engines for Europe / Scandinavian rail

raileurope.co.uk

Presumably when you say Med Cruise you'd have a stay in Masstricht then pick up a cruise from somewhere like Ostend or Amsterdam ? You might want a while to look around Amsterdam.

For the med, we have not been dissappointed with Carnival from the US. They have Baltic trips from London – cool history, but son is more interested in joining us in Med. They sail from Barcelona to Venice and back

Ah, Carnival Cruise Italy, operators of this ship
link