10 Days Road Trip through Northern Italy and Austria with family

It had been our dream to do a road trip in Europe. When we visited Switzerland back in May 2017 in an organised group tour, we were more tempted to do a road trip on our own. So, once we started looking for flights and found relatively cheap flights to Milan Italy, we thought this is it.

So, I booked return tickets for Milan, and started preparing for Visa. As normal people always had that visa question in mind that we would get it or not, we did not plan anything before getting our visa. (For a relief our tickets were also refundable). So, I used this flight tickets and booked hotels from Booking.com just for the visa which I could cancel later on. And we got our visa. More details on the applying and process of Schengen visa for Indians will be coming up in separate blog.

So, we had visa in our hand now and we started planning our trip. We started finding optimum route to cover most desirable places in 10 days. First question we had to figure out is what to cover in Italy, what its most famous for like Rome, Venice, Florence and Pisa or Alps. We are mountain lovers and it make no sense to drive through big cities in Italy, so it did not take much time to decide that we should cover maximum of North. Then we thought; "Lets include Austria as well". While planning our route we finalised few of the options in mind but kept our plan bit flexible due to uncertainty of the weather in the month of April in that region.

We planned this trip keeping few things in mind, most important was to keep it under budget but not by compromising so much on comfort and experience. We wanted to stay in Airbnb and not hotel so that we can make our own food which can get the cost significantly down as well as we can attend to the needs of our youngest adventurer Veeha. She would have been exhausted in few days if we did not have something of her taste to eat. So, Airbnb was best option for us by far. We carried lots of instant food packets and snacks with us which enabled us to keep expenses under budget plus we did not miss the home food. I may write more on this in upcoming blog that how to prepare and what to carry and what could be easily and cheaply available there in super market locally.

Here is the final version of Itinerary we came up.

Itinerary