Nine nights total, three cities roughly two hours apart by train, first proper trip with my partner who gets tired of packing quickly. Option one is three nights in each. Option two is picking two bases and doing the third city as a day trip. Accommodation prices are similar in all three. What actually makes the difference here?
Count travel days honestly and the answer usually appears by itself. A two hour train is not two hours, it is check out by 11, get to the station, travel, arrive, cannot check in until 15:00, drag bags around or pay for storage. Call it half a day gone each time. Three cities with two moves costs you a full day out of nine.
With three nights per city you get two full days in each, which is a genuinely good ratio and I would take that over a day trip. Day trips to a city two hours away leave you with about five hours there and a lot of it spent watching the clock.
Where I would change my mind is your partner. If packing and moving is what exhausts them, two bases wins even at the cost of a shallower visit to the third.
The half a day per move framing settles it. Two bases, and the third city gets its own trip another year.
Also nothing wrong with admitting you will come back. Trying to see everything once is how people end up remembering none of it.
Mild disagreement. Two hours apart is genuinely close, and if the trains are frequent and cheap the three night version is not stressful, especially if you travel mid morning rather than first thing. Three nights is my personal minimum anywhere, and below it a place never stops feeling like a transit lounge.
Agreed on the three night minimum as a rule. We differ mostly on how much the packing itself costs, which depends entirely on the people involved.
Practical detail for the two base version: check whether the day trip city has luggage storage at the station and what time it closes. Also check the last train back and then plan to take the one before it, because missing the last one turns a cheap day out into a taxi you will remember for years.
Taking the one before last is a rule I will now apply everywhere.
@nightbus_nadia · 10mo ago
Whichever you pick, build in one deliberately empty day around day five or six. Not a rest day in the sense of doing nothing, just a day with nothing booked. Every long trip I have taken without one turned brittle exactly at that point, and the first argument is usually about a train.
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