Update on the Last Post

I've done a little more research and I htink I might have a great solution.

I've discovered the small Belgian city of Verviers. It's got a few good things going for it:

1. It's closer to Aachen than Liege.
2. It's closer to Spa than Liege.
3. It has an Avis car rental place

Those three things combine to mean that we can save time, avoid backtracking and stay somewhere other than Liege...which I've heard is dirty.

Here's what I'm suggesting:

We stay in Aachen on night #1. If we don't hit any snags, we'll be there at 5pm.

The next day, we take the 30 minute train ride to Verviers, take a taxi to the Avis and rent a car.

Depending on how well we defeat jetlag, we could be in a rental car as early as 10am.

From Verviers, it's about a 25 minute drive to Spa. So we'd have most of the day to see the track and enjoy the town.

There are also a lot of great looking small hotels/b&bs in Spa, so we could just stay there for the night.

The next day we drive to Delft.

How's that sound?

Options for the First Two Nights

We know we're getting into Dusseldorf at 1:50pm on Sunday, May 12th and we know we're staying the night at a B&B in Delft the night of Tuesday, May 14th. What we don't know is how we are filling the time in between.

The way I see it we can stay in one of three cities: Cologne, Aachen or Liege. And we can stay one or both nights in any of those.

Cologne
Cologne has the advantage of being the closest to the Dusseldorf Airport - under an hour on the train. We might be pretty tired after 20 hours of travel so this could be a good option. Cologne looks like this:

It's on the Rhine river and is Germany's fourth largest city. So it's not exactly a quaint German village or anything, but it could be a good, convenient spot to get a taste of Germany and rest our heads on Night #1.

Aachen
Getting to Aachen would require a train transfer in Cologne. From the airport, it would be about and hour and a half to get to Aachen by trian. So we'd be pulling in around 5pm - about 45 minutes later that we'd get to Cologne.

Aachen is much smaller than Cologne and is an old spa town that was a favorite of Charlamagne. It looks like this:

Aachen would give us a quieter place for our first night - kind of easing us into the trip. Also, you'd still be able to say that you spent a night in Germany.

And it would be super-quick to hop on a train the next day and go the half hour into Belgium to rent a car.

Liege
Liege is another half hour on the train past Aachen (over an hour past Cologne). So we'd be getting in around 5:30pm - (that's 8:30am our time - so we'd be travelling for about 24 hours at this point.)

Liege is in Belgium - which is nice because that's where we want to rent a car (since we'll be returning the car in Beligium later). It's about the same size as Aachen and it looks like this:

It's a more modern city that Aachen, but I'm sure there's still some good old stuff around.

The main advantage for us, for staying in Liege is that we can rent a car first thing Monday morning and drive off to Spa to see the race track (about an hour's drive from Liege).

So that's the scoop! Let's make a decision so we can research some lodging.