10 days in Summer 2025: Where in Europe with 12 and 15 y/o?
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Anonymous
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Trying to plan a fun 10 day summer trip for next summer. Girl, 12, loves museums, history, house tours, food, shows. She does not like outdoorsy activities or crowds. She loves Williamsburg: eating in the taverns, touring the houses, the carriage rides.
Boy, 15, loves adventure, the outdoors, history, gaming, hiking. He does not like museums, house tours, and bores easily. He liked visiting NYC where we toured Rockefeller Center, Ellis Island and the Statute of Liberty, and unique stores like Harry Potter. We have had multiple overseas trips planned but had to cancel for many reasons. I need a trip that is easy to manage with these two. I need to plan like there will be 3 of us; likely I will have another adult join but can't be certain. |
Anonymous
| Is there a specific reason you want to go to Europe? More exactly, is there a specific country or area you want to go to? Frankly sounds like your kids like pretty different things and it's gonna be tough to find a good match no matter where you go. |
Anonymous
| London, maybe add York and Edinburgh |
Anonymous
| London, Belgium and Amsterdam. Take some side trips from London. |
Anonymous
| I did London and Paris with my 2 boys at that age. There’s something for everyone and honestly they have to just learn to roll with it when it’s not their turn. But also, it sounds like your son does like history and interesting sights, maybe just not art museums? Does your daughter? Tower of London, Churchill War Rooms, Buckingham Palace, Versailles, the Louvre (which is a spectacular building even if you just cruise one wing for an hour or two), Eiffel tower, cool neighborhoods in both cities, great food (we just took turns picking restaurant). If they cant learn to be good sports for part of each day, knowing there will be good food and plenty of things they DO want to do, you may as well just go to the beach… |
Anonymous
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If you go to London, I’d suggest tickets to either six (hsitroy) or the show that went wrong (funny)—-I think a 15 year old boy would at least tolerate either of those.
My kids that are liked buckingham palace, the tower, the London eye, the Harry Potter studio. |
Anonymous
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On one vacation , we took the lead from the foreign language classes they were taking in HS (German and French in our case). In each location, each kid could have a day to plan what to see and do, as well as how to travel via the various train lines. We had fun with this approach and surprisingly, the other went along with it too.
In the planning stages, visit your local library for travel books. Rick Steves and Fodor’s comes to mind |
Anonymous
| Honestly I would pick someplace you want to go and then find excursions for your child. I can’t tell you how many times we planned something with a child’s joy in mind and were just disappointed that they didn’t love it. |
Anonymous
| I recommend a trip we did recently which was fantastic - perfect amount of staying put vs. moving around for similarly aged kids with similar interests (nature, history, museums). Fly into Madrid (much cheaper than Barcelona), drive up to Asturias and spend a few days exploring Northern Spain (we did Asturias/Picos de Europa and San Sebastian). Drive up to the Dordogne in France to explore medieval villages, canoe on the river, ride bikes (and don't miss the Font du Gaume cave paintings - amazing!). Then take a train up to Paris to fly home (we had a couple days in Paris and just explored, no big agenda). We went in June and the weather was perfect and I think we avoided the worst crowds. Our trip was I think more like 14 days, so not sure it's possible in 10 - if I were going to cut something out it would be Paris because it's worth its own trip at some point. |
Anonymous
| You could visit the castles in Germany along the Rhine. Your daughter would like that, and there’s lots of hiking for your son. |
Anonymous
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Ok not sure how you are feeling about driving overseas with them but we did a train/ferry trip with kids at that age which they loved.
We did Dublin (EPIC, Kilmainham, Book of Kells), train to Belfast (Titanic Musesum, Peace Wall, lot of old pubs), bus tour of the Causeway Coast, then ferry Belfast to Cairnryan, train to Glasgow (our favorite), then train to London and flew back out of London. There is so much to see and you can take it slowly which is what we liked and I didn't have to fly. There are Sailrail tickets. I booked our ferry and trains first then we built what we wanted to do around those times. |
Anonymous
This sounds amazing. How long was your full trip? |
Anonymous
| Our trip was 12 days but if you have a shorter time I would not do the Causeway Coast (we went back and did it while driving) since it really needs more time. We were flying out of London so had to get there but did look at going from Glasgow back to Dublin via train and ferry. My kids would rather be in the countryside stopping at small village, walking around a cemetery (no I don't know why) or ruins and eating in a pub then seeing museum. They did love London though. We did Tower tour which wasn't wow, Westminster and came upon a destroyer on the Thames which they loved. Their favorite were the Churchhill war rooms. |
Anonymous
If you add Scotland, make that the "wild" part of your trip. There are a lot of cool activities in the Highlands - hiking, fishing, archery, horses, jeep outings, etc. |
Anonymous
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Wherever you go, have your kids read some fun books and watch some movies about the history, etc. They will find all of the places, including museums much more interesting if they know something before they get there.
I think we've posted some ideas in this Forum before for various locations. |