PLEASE HELP

[izzyfer]

Ok, this is me and my friends first time to travel independently in europe. I visited last year on a guided tour and never imagine doing that again. First we have much ambition to travel as much of europe as we can within a one month period of time. We are planning on traveling in the month of june and have many questions.
First i found a route in a book called the european masterpiece which starts in london, goes to amsterdam, over to germany in the rhine river valley down to vienna austria. It then suggests spending some time in italy and shooting over to greece which i am very keen on doing. It then leads you back to italy up to france in the mediteranian over to spain in barcelona and then to madrid where the trip ends.
Of course this is rough and i plan on spending a couple days in a few of the major areas. Is this possible within a month and will it allow time to relax?
Second, is it neccesarry to book every hostel, i am already very stressed by having nothing to go on and planning a trip by ourselves. I cant imagine booking each hostel and knowing if and when im going to be there.

PLEASE HELP. any advice will do. Thank you

[herrbert]

You can make it a little bit easier on yourself to make an exact list with the places you and your friends would like to visit, and how many nights you will spend there. For you it might look a little bit like this: (with the places you mentioned)

London (4 nights)
Amsterdam (2-3 nights)
Cologne / Rhine Valley (2 nights)
Munich? (3 nights)
Salzburg? (1 night)
Vienna (4 nights)
Venice (2 nights)
Florence (3-4 nights)
Rome (4-5 nights)
Athens (3 nights)
Greek Island (Santorini?) (3 nights)
Nice/Marseille (2-3 nights)
Madrid* (daytrip Toledo)(3-4 nights)
Barcelona (3-4 nights)

* I reversed Madrid and Barcelona, because the only way from France to Barcelona is a very long trainride, whilst, there is a flight available to Madrid from Marseille

I filled in the number of days, that I think that a city needs, at a minimum, if you counted the days you will see you would be well over the 30-31 days, that you can have. (I would estimate 39-45 days for a trip like that), so that would mean losing a couple of cities. But if you can come up, with a list that would fit in your time frame, than you can also calculate on what day, you need to be in which city, and book hostels, buy Airline tickets, reserve trains if necesarry (think Eurostar) etc etc. As you will be in Europe in a busy period, I would recommend booking you hostels in advance, if you want to fly cheap, and believe me for stretches you want to (to Greece and back, and to Spain)

If your friends and you can agree on which cities, you want to visit, the group here will give their advice. I made my itinerary as an example, if you want to put in other cities or places (Paris, Prague, Berlin), then do so, but realize, that a normal city needs about 2-3 days to explore, and major cities 4-5 days (as a guide-line)

[madamtrashheap]

izzyfer, welcome to GFE!
The itinerary Herrbert has provided is a good blueprint from which to start your plans, so take his advice on board.

izzyfer said:

Is this possible within a month and will it allow time to relax?

If you only have a month, it depends on what you call "relaxing". If you want to chill out on beaches/islands, then you'll obviously have to forgo some other places to allow the time there, so keep that in mind when you and your friends are working out which cities interest you. As Herrbert has said, once you work out the places of interest for you all, your itinerary will be easier to plan. Get back to us once you've done this and we'll see how we can help.