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.