Planning Resources

Guidebooks

Our primary info source for planning this trip was the Rough Guide to Germany. Secondarily we used Earl Steinbicker's Day Trips in Germany. As we go along in the trip we'll comment on how well these guides hold up.

Using the German Web

An important third source was the web. Rough Guide is especially good about providing URLs for every town, museum, castle and park. Often those pages prove to be in German, but that's rarely an impediment. First, lots of German sites have a little UK flag for English translations (also Polish, sometimes French). For example the excellent Railway site, bahn.de, offers both a UK-English and a US-English version. Often these translated pages are incomplete; only some pages are in the English set. But that doesn't matter because of Google's translation service. You can paste some German text into it and get an instant translation, or paste in a URL and up comes the website with all text translated. And if you click a link in a translated page, the new page gets translated automatically as well. The translation isn't perfect but it is serviceable. Also, any part of the site that is a graphic, or built on the fly by javascript or the like, isn't translated. That means that most buttons and many menus are still in German. No matter, with a little care you can surf the german internet very well.