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 😅
Guides, road trips & hidden gems 🗺️
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You’ve come to the right place to read more About Us! I’m Nick from “The Travel Tinker”, Tinkering with ideas to fuel your next trip and offering Bespoke Itineraries! I started to really get interested in travel back in 2007 when I visited Brazil and I was hooked! If you’re ever in Brazil make sure you visit the sloths! I have created this website to help people create their own epic trip! I believe that it’s best to teach by example, and our ultimate goal at The Travel Tinker is to show that travel can be safe, easy, and a lot of fun. Be sure to checkout the whole site, any issues please let me know. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting! TheTravelTinker.com

I got off the airport bus in Innsbruck, put my bag down on the pavement, looked up, and there was a rock face at the end...
18/09/2026

I got off the airport bus in Innsbruck, put my bag down on the pavement, looked up, and there was a rock face at the end of the street. Not off in the distance somewhere. Right there, wedged between two blocks of flats like somebody had parked it.

I need to get back there!

What I'd tell you before you go:

✅ The Innsbruck Card is worth it or it isn't, and it depends entirely on one thing (the maths is in the post)
✅ Stay across the river. Cheaper, five minutes from the Old Town, better view walking home
✅ Hall in Tirol is twenty minutes on a normal bus and nobody goes
✅ Give the hop-on hop-off bus a miss, the city's too small to need it

Full guide's in the comments.

Anyone been? I want to know if I'm wrong about Seefeld 👇

Best Austrian Hiking Trails 🥾Austria doesn't grade trails for visitors. It grades them for peoplewho grew up on them. On...
17/09/2026

Best Austrian Hiking Trails 🥾

Austria doesn't grade trails for visitors. It grades them for people
who grew up on them. Once you understand that, the whole country opens
up, because there is genuinely something for everyone here.

What I wish I'd known before that trip:

✅ The colours on the signposts tell you everything. Yellow, red, black.
Learn them in thirty seconds, save yourself a bad afternoon.
✅ Signpost times are moving times. No lunch, no photos, no faff.
✅ Alpine club membership costs less than five hut nights and includes
mountain rescue cover.
✅ Most valleys give you a free guest card with your accommodation.
Buses, often the cable cars too. Nobody tells you unless you ask.
✅ You can see the best of it on day walks. You don't have to commit
to a week of dormitories.

Twelve routes in the new guide, from a flat lakeside loop you'd do in
an hour to a high circuit that will genuinely test you. Costs in pounds,
euros and dollars, because the lift tickets add up faster than you think.

Link in the comments 👇

Which one are you doing first, the easy lakes or the big ridge?

Went to Vienna the first time with no tickets booked and no clue. Queued fifty minutes at Schönbrunn in the sun, shuffle...
16/09/2026

Went to Vienna the first time with no tickets booked and no clue. Queued fifty minutes at Schönbrunn in the sun, shuffled round behind three coach parties, came out wondering what the fuss was about.

Went back two days later at opening time with a booked slot and had the Great Gallery nearly to myself. Same palace. Completely different day.

That gap is basically the whole city. The sights are brilliant, but a good day here comes down to timing and knowing what's worth your afternoon. So I wrote down the ten I'd actually send a mate to, with real prices and the bits I'd skip:

✅ Standing opera tickets for about £13, same room as the seats costing ten times that
✅ Schönbrunn done early, before the coaches land
✅ The 343 steps up the Steffl (and the free view from the back of the cathedral)
✅ Which coffee house to sit in for three hours, and why you never just ask for "a coffee"
✅ Three famous things I'd honestly skip, and three I'd swap in instead

Full guide with all ten, prices in £/€/$, and a proper transport breakdown. Link's in the comments 👇

What's the one thing in Vienna you'd tell a first-timer not to miss?

10 years of eating my way round the world and the meal I still think about most cost $2.40. 🍜Plastic stool. One pan. No ...
15/09/2026

10 years of eating my way round the world and the meal I still think about most cost $2.40. 🍜

Plastic stool. One pan. No menu. A woman in Hanoi who'd been cooking the same thing since before I was born.

I've also paid more for a tasting menu than I paid for the flight and walked out still hungry. So this list isn't me romanticising cheap food. It's the ten places where the eating is the actual reason to go, not something you do between museums.

What's on it:
✅ Two cities where £7 a day feeds you properly
✅ The one European food city I send every first-timer to
✅ Why you should move your big meal to lunch (this saves more than any other trick)
✅ What a food day genuinely costs in ten cities, in £, € and $
✅ Five famous food cities that didn't make the cut, and why

✍️ Helen

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.

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