The Travel Tinker - Travel Guides & Road Trips

The Travel Tinker - Travel Guides & Road Trips Nick ✈️ TheTravelTinker.com
I make the travel mistakes so you don't have to 😅
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Germany's Black Forest Road Trip:Four days in the Black Forest, and the thing I keep thinking about isn't the waterfalls...
11/09/2026

Germany's Black Forest Road Trip:

Four days in the Black Forest, and the thing I keep thinking about isn't the waterfalls or the cake. It's the B500.

You leave Baden-Baden in sunshine, climb up onto the ridge road, and twenty minutes later you're driving through fog with gold beeches either side and the valley completely gone below you. Then you drop back out into sun at Freudenstadt like nothing happened. Genuinely one of the best hours of driving I've done in Germany.

The loop: Freiburg, out to Titisee and Schluchsee, up to the Triberg waterfalls, across to Gengenbach (which is almost annoyingly pretty), into Baden-Baden for a soak, then the ridge road home. Around 390km, four days, no backtracking.

Two things I'd tell anyone going in autumn. Check the forecast for the tops, not the town, because the ridge does its own weather. And ask about the KONUS guest card when you book your accommodation, since loads of guesthouses hand you one and it covers local buses and trains for free.

Five days, one hire car, and about four hours of usable daylight to work with. Tromsø Road Trip...This is the Tromsø loo...
10/09/2026

Five days, one hire car, and about four hours of usable daylight to work with. Tromsø Road Trip...

This is the Tromsø loop I keep recommending to people. Out along Kvaløya to the white beaches at Sommarøy, then a little car ferry over to Senja for the coast road everyone photographs, then across the fjord into the Lyngen Alps before an easy roll back into town. No backtracking, and every leg feels different.

Two things I've been honest about rather than glossing over. Day four is a proper transfer day, four to five hours behind the wheel. And the Senja ferry runs year round but has barely any winter sailings, takes no reservations, and gets cancelled in rough weather. Miss it and you're going the long way round via Finnsnes.

The full guide has the day by day route, the ferry crossings, where to sleep for properly dark skies, and the free Google Map with everything pinned.

Link in the first comment.

Why You Should Visit Germany! 🇩🇪Everyone tells you German trains run like clockwork. 🚆They don't. Not right now.Long-dis...
09/09/2026

Why You Should Visit Germany! 🇩🇪

Everyone tells you German trains run like clockwork. 🚆

They don't. Not right now.

Long-distance ICE and IC punctuality is sitting around 60%, the worst run in decades, while the network gets rebuilt. Regional trains are fine, close to 89% on time. But almost every Germany guide out there is still repeating the clockwork line, and people are booking tight connections off the back of it.

⚠️ Here's the bit nobody tells you though. If your long-distance train is 60+ minutes late, you can claim 25% of your fare back. At 120 minutes it's 50%. Takes about five minutes to file. I've had money back more than once and barely anyone bothers.

So I've written the honest version. What Germany actually costs in £, € and $. Which cities are worth your nights and which you can skip. Why a Gasthof beats a chain hotel every time. The Sunday closures that catch people out. And the castle ticketing trap that's still wrong on half the internet. 🏰

Germany is still one of the best-value countries in western Europe. You just want the real picture before you book.

👉 Link's in the comments.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about landing at Charles de Gaulle 🇫🇷The RER B station called "Charles de Gaulle 1" is...
08/09/2026

Here's the thing nobody tells you about landing at Charles de Gaulle 🇫🇷

The RER B station called "Charles de Gaulle 1" is not at Terminal 1. It's over by Terminal 3. I've watched more than one jet-lagged traveller march off confidently in completely the wrong direction, suitcase rattling behind them.

So here's the honest version of getting into Paris:

🚆 RER B train, about 35 minutes to Gare du Nord, roughly €14. Cheapest and usually fastest, but expect stairs, crowds and no luggage racks.

🚕 Official taxi, a fixed €56 to the Right Bank or €65 to the Left Bank. That's per car for up to four people, not per person, so a family or a group splits it and suddenly it's competitive with the train.

🚐 Private transfer if you're landing late, arriving somewhere new, or travelling with kids who melt down when a plan wobbles.

🚌 And the Roissybus? It's gone. Permanently. Half the advice online still tells you to catch it, which is how people end up at the Opéra bus stand looking puzzled.

I've broken down every option with real costs in £, € and $, plus which station matches your terminal so you don't do the confident-wrong-direction walk.

Link in the comments 👇

Perthshire Road Trip:Perthshire calls itself Big Tree Country, which sounds like tourist board bluster until you actuall...
07/09/2026

Perthshire Road Trip:

Perthshire calls itself Big Tree Country, which sounds like tourist board bluster until you actually drive it in October.

I did this loop out of Perth over three days and it's still one of my favourite easy road trips in Scotland. You get the world's tallest hedge (a third of a mile of beech, 100 feet up, planted in 1745). You get The Hermitage near Dunkeld, where the path ends at a folly hanging over a waterfall and the Douglas firs are so tall you get a bit dizzy looking up. You get Queen's View staring down Loch Tummel at Schiehallion. And in a tiny churchyard at Fortingall there's a yew that might be 5,000 years old, which is a genuinely odd thing to stand next to on a Tuesday afternoon.

Best bit: it's only 145 miles total. No ten-hour driving days, no motorway slog. Just short hops between proper stops, which is exactly what you want when the trees are doing that thing they do in autumn.

Five nights standing in car parks at minus fifteen, staring at the sky. That's a Lapland aurora trip, and I'd do it agai...
07/09/2026

Five nights standing in car parks at minus fifteen, staring at the sky. That's a Lapland aurora trip, and I'd do it again tomorrow.

We drove Rovaniemi up to Inari and back. Around 700km all in, which sounds like a lot until you realise the roads are empty and the scenery keeps changing on you. Forest and river at the start, then rounded fells with snow-loaded spruce standing about like white ghosts, then the big quiet emptiness of the far north where the Sami have herded reindeer for centuries.

Highlights nobody warned me about: digging your own amethyst out of the snow on a fell top. Standing on Lake Inari once it's frozen into a white plain. And the fact that real aurora usually turns up as a faint grey arc your camera picks up before your eyes do, not the postcard version. When the postcard version does arrive, though, you forget your feet are cold.

Full 5 day route is up on the blog now, with a free map, where to stay each night, and the driving stuff I learned the hard way. Reindeer on the road at dusk being the main one.

Enjoy, Helen.

Link in the first comment.

Vermont Bridges Road Trip.Vermont has more covered bridges than any other state, so I went looking for the best of them....
03/09/2026

Vermont Bridges Road Trip.

Vermont has more covered bridges than any other state, so I went looking for the best of them.

Four days, Burlington down to Bennington, motorway avoided wherever possible. The plan was simple: string together the prettiest bridges without turning the whole thing into a checklist. Northfield Falls has this one spot where you can line up two covered bridges in a single photo, which I'd never managed anywhere else. Route 100 is the sort of road you take slowly on purpose. And Grafton at the far end is so quiet you can hear the river from the porch.

If you like your sightseeing with a slow lunch attached (cheddar, cider doughnuts, a maple creemee from a roadside stand), this one's got your name on it.

Right, let me tell you about the best few weeks of the year to be in South Tyrol.Every autumn the farms up the Eisacktal...
02/09/2026

Right, let me tell you about the best few weeks of the year to be in South Tyrol.

Every autumn the farms up the Eisacktal valley throw open their cellars, and half the region spends the season walking between hillside farmhouses eating roasted chestnuts and drinking wine that was grapes about ten minutes ago. It's called Törggelen, and it's one of my favourite things in Europe. No exaggeration.

I've turned it into an easy 4-day drive. Bolzano to start, up onto the Ritten plateau, into pretty little Klausen, then the chestnut farms of Villanders and Feldthurns, finishing in Brixen with a Dolomites view that stops you dead. Barely any time behind the wheel. Loads of eating. My kind of trip.

Full route, map and where to eat in the first comment. 👇

Most people do Dublin in a straight line. Trinity, Book of Kells, Grafton Street, Temple Bar, home by teatime.The Dublin...
02/09/2026

Most people do Dublin in a straight line. Trinity, Book of Kells, Grafton Street, Temple Bar, home by teatime.

The Dublin I keep going back to is running parallel to all that, about two streets over, where nobody's queuing for anything.

There's a walled garden behind the National Concert Hall that people walk past for years without going in. A library from 1707 where readers who wanted the rare books got locked in wire cages with them, and some of those books still carry bullet damage from 1916. A church crypt on the north side with mummified bodies you can go down and see. And a Georgian street that went from the grandest address in the city to one of the poorest inside about a hundred and fifty years.

I've linked the lot into one walk. 6.2km, flat the whole way, starts on the canal at Portobello and finishes on Henrietta Street. Most of it is free, and there's a free Google Map at the bottom of the article.

One bit of advice: go Tuesday to Saturday. Sundays and Mondays close a lot of these doors and you'll spend the day looking at shut gates.

Full route, timings and map in the comments 👇

Devon & Dartmoor Road Trip 🚗Devon does this thing where you can be stood on a fog-soaked tor at eleven in the morning, a...
01/09/2026

Devon & Dartmoor Road Trip 🚗

Devon does this thing where you can be stood on a fog-soaked tor at eleven in the morning, and by half one you're on a harbour wall in Salcombe eating crab out of a paper bag while a gull works out its angle of attack. Same county. Same day.

I've just put together a 4 day loop that leans into exactly that. Exeter out and Exeter back, so nothing doubles up. Dartmoor first while your legs are still keen (Castle Drogo, the clapper bridge at Postbridge, Princetown looking suitably bleak), then down through Plymouth's Barbican, along the South Hams to Salcombe and Slapton Sands, into Dartmouth, and back up onto the moor for Haytor on the last morning.

About 200 miles all in. None of the driving days are long. What actually eats your time is the lanes, and the fact you'll pull over for a view roughly twice a day and pretend it was planned.

One honest warning: check the tide before you park at Bigbury, or you'll be wading back to the car with your shoes in your hand.

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