Another trip — this time a solo trip with young kids in Hamburg and Lübeck? Yes, please. After our last-minute trip to Hanover in February, I knew I wanted to go back to Germany with my kids again soon. It was such a nice, dare I say easy, time away with the kids. So I booked another solo trip the day after my son finishes school to head to Hamburg on the train. Frustratingly, there’s no direct train from Amsterdam, but I did manage to book the private kids compartment for both legs — it will take about 5.5 hours.
I wanted to use this post as an experiment in trip-planning, and then compare how it actually went afterwards. A big part of my hobby of traveling is the anticipation of it! The excitement and planning is integral. It certainly adds to the enjoyment – unless you fall into the trap of over-expecting and then being underwhelmed and disappointed if an experience or a hotel under-delivers. I’m notorious for this when I go to very nice luxury hotels – it’s easy to expect a lot from them because you’re paying so much or have heard so many good things.
Now that my baby is getting older (he’s almost 2), it’s becoming much easier to do these trips with both of them. Yes, I’m aware most people think I am crazy to be traveling alone with two kids under 5. But I love it. Recently my five-year-old started talking excitedly about how much he wants to go traveling again, and I knew I’ve been doing something right!
The big logistic issue is that the youngest is getting heavy, and I really dislike traveling with strollers. I don’t like dealing with folding them up, worrying about stairs, etc. He’s running around more now, and if I can get to pedestrian-friendly areas, it’s easy to get a break from the carrier and let him down.
It’s fairly easy not to expect too much when it comes solo travel with kids. I’m not looking for luxury because I can’t really spend time relaxing and enjoying it anyway, at least not without a babysitter.
I decided I really wanted to visit Lübeck, the marzipan town of Germany!! I found out about this place by the chocolate I bought in a supermarket on my last trip. I love marzipan and really enjoyed my trip to Toledo, Spain ten years ago which is also known for its marzipan. So I guess I’m collecting marzipan towns.
Lübeck, whilst very easy to get to from Hamburg (50min), is really not that doable if you’re trying to get there in a day from Amsterdam. I thought about flying in to Hamburg, but it’s much more expensive to fly than to take the train (kids are free until age 6). Only later did I realise there is actually a small international airport there, too, but it is also too expensive to get to.
So, the trip planning here had a lot of twists and turns. Maybe this post can help distill my thought process when it comes to planning trips (or anything really)…
Step 1: There’s a holiday! Time to travel!
I have one great and also not so great constraint now that my eldest is in school: school holidays. I am not allowed to take him out of school anymore. Which sucks. It means we’re constrained to only 45 days in the summer (I counted). On the plus side, I now know that since I love traveling, if I’m going to actually do it, I’d better plan as many trips as I can when he’s out of school.
So I knew right off the bat that I wanted to go somewhere shortly after he was out of school. I was waiting to plan something until we’d recovered from our trip to the Yorkshire coast (our May holiday and soon-to-be part of this trip too…). And oh boy, did I plan something.
Step 2: Have a place in mind? Figure out transport and dates
I already knew I wanted to go to Hamburg, for a few reasons:
- We already have some really big trips planned later this year (Kenya and the States), and Germany is an easy trip for us; and
- The travelogues I read for Copenhagen almost all included a Hamburg stopover, making it like a really cool place, at least in the 18-19th centuries! I love that it was an import/export mecca. They have a Customs & Tax Museum I want to visit (ChatGPT is insisting it’s not for kids but I’m going to prove it wrong).
So, Hamburg it was. Additionally, it’s close to Lübeck, and as I wanted to go there too, I decided to combine them and make it a slightly longer trip.
So, to get to Hamburg we’ll be taking two ICE trains from Amsterdam Centraal. I chose our date of travel around the ability to book out a private compartment with the kids. A wonderful way to travel! The fun part of this is stocking up on lots and lots of snack for the 5+ hour journey, and also making sure I travel during my baby’s nap window so I get a little bit of downtime, too. My eldest is pretty easily entertained with his iPad the entire time (his only opportunity to use it is when we travel).
As for our return, we had been intending to go to my husband’s home town in England again this summer. I thought about taking the train back to Amsterdam first, but this didn’t make sense given that the German summer holidays starting meant that trains were much busier than the week before. And also — we could just fly out of a quieter German airport straight to the UK. So in the end, I sucked it up and added another leg to our trip by flying out of Hamburg into Manchester on our last day!
Step 3: Book hotels, keeping in mind distance to transport hubs
I had a few hotel discounts to use up: Chase United was offering me a $50 off voucher for a hotel booking; also my American Express Platinum which gets $300 twice a year at its luxury hotels. So I knew I would book a Fine Hotel & Resort via my AmEx in Hamburg for 1 night. I like saving the best hotels for the end – it’s a nice way to unwind and enjoy the hotel rather than focus on getting through the sights.
So I ended up booking the following hotels:
- 2 nights at the INNSiDE Hamburg Hafen: billed as family-friendly, with an excitingly free mini-bar, this was the closest relatively nice but budget hotel I could find near the central train station. I booked this nonrefundable without breakfast.
- 3 nights at the H+ Hotel Lübeck: this was the cheapest hotel I could find in Lübeck and is also right next to the station. I’m imagining this is a slightly tired and old hotel that should be perfectly adequate for our needs – in line with what we booked in Hanover.
- 1 night at the Conrad Hamburg: the crown jewel of our trip, this is our luxury pick of the trip. It is slightly closer to the station, and we get $300 off for the night we stay, a $120 credit for food / drink, an upgrade if available, 12pm checkin and 4pm checkout! The 4pm checkout is priceless — it means we can do my son’s nap in the hotel and then get to the airport right after.
- Randomly, 1 night in the UK at the Yotel Manchester Deansgate: At the end of the trip, we’ll fly out from Hamburg on our way back to visit my husband’s family in Yorkshire. The Yotel is squarely because it was the cheapest nice hotel I could find right next to the best breakfast in the UK: Dishoom! Also fantastic with children. I’ll go to their Manchester location, but you can see me rave about it on my last trip to London here.
This is not illustrative of a typical trip I would usually book with the kids. I used to like hopping from place to place, but over the last few years I’ve come to love settling in to one place and using it as a base for day trips as well as getting to know a place a bit better. But because I really wanted to visit Lübeck, and hotels were cheaper there, I decided to split the trip this way between the two locations. I’m actually quite excited about randomly having 3 nights in a small German town. I think it will be a good mix of modern / city-life in Hamburg and old town Germany in Lübeck.
Once I book hotels, I contact them to request cribs / diaper bins. When I travel alone with my kids (3 people in a room), it’s not so much of an issue yet, but when we all go as a family with my husband, hotels in Europe tend to not allow 4 people to a room. Sometimes this is due to the booking system and sometimes due to fire regulations. The trick here is to ensure you book a refundable room (usually without specifying how many people will be in the room) and then contact them to confirm that 2 adults + 2 young kids is ok. When they are older I’m pretty sure we will start to have to book 2 rooms, but for now we seem to be able to manage.
As for hotel location, if the central train station is in a good area, then I much prefer staying there with kids so we don’t have to lug our bags far. This might mean it’s a bit hard to get back to the hotel for naptime, but I typically assume those are all a write-off during the days we travel.
Step 4: Obsessively track things I want to do (both with and without young kids in Hamburg)
Now that I’ve finally booked everything (mostly nonrefundable), it’s time to get excited! I will usually have had one or two things that I was keen to see that caused me to book in the first place. I start to track how hard it is to get from the hotel to the sights, and then mark all the museums and cafes I want to visit. I also have a few discount programmes that I use:
- NeoTaste: I booked this in the Netherlands but it turns out to be very popular in Germany. A lot of places offer 10 EUR off meals or 2-for-1 mains. What a great way to get some food for my kids without being annoyed if they don’t actually eat it (pretty common). This is my referral code for a mutual discount to get started.
- TooGoodtoGo is a great way to get end-of-day food from cafes / restaurants if you want to take it back and eat in the hotel. I use it for early dinners when you don’t want to drag tired kids out of the hotel, or to get snacks for our train journeys. which are great with kids to get a discount during our meals. Try it out with my referral code here.
I will often just mark all the things I want to see myself. Most museums I find are absolutely fine with kids. If my toddler is too manic I just keep him in the carrier the whole time. It’s the tiny cafes / restaurants which are more difficult when you’re alone with young kids in Hamburg and other cities, and I am warier about bringing them along to places that don’t have much space for kids to run around. I also love anywhere that has sand or a playground or any sort of grass for them.
As for Hamburg, this spot on the river, Sonnendeck St. Pauli: Dein Beachclub, looks like a fun spot to try. It turns out it is also close to the fish market (open on Sunday, when we will have a full day in Hamburg), and another museum in Altona that has a huge kid-friendly area. All info I gleaned from this lovely blog article on things to do with kids in Hamburg.
As for Lübeck, I certainly intend to head to the marzipan museum and wander around the Old Town. Plus, it’s a quick day trip to a day at the seaside! We will take a 19min train ride to Travemünde, and then I intend to have a drink and relax at the seaside while the kids play in the sand and also this amazing playground overlooking the Baltic Sea.
I’ve got many more places I want to check out. I mark all these things on Google Maps and then get excited for the journey ahead. Additionally, one of my friends is planning to come for two nights from London, and another German friend might come visit for a day, which will be a nice way to ease the pressure off from watching my kids solo. Stay tuned for how the trip actually goes this summer!
