We are planning a future trip to Europe. We are going to fly into major city Paris/Frankfurt and train to Berlin.

Then we want to drive around Germany/Austria for a couple weeks.

How hard will this be for an American not afraid of Chicago, LA, San Fran, DC traffic and only a little afraid of NYC.

We want to get into little towns and stop along the way.

Safe? Are GPS databases equally good as US? Parking (is that going to be a headache?

Any tips appreciated

Germany and Austria are two of the nicest countries to drive around. The roads are good, signage is clear, discipline of other drivers is generally impeccable. GPS navigation systems are as sophisticated in Europe as elsewhere. There are parking facilities in most places too!

Concur with Tiger79 - Driving is no problem and I did not have a GPS. Roads well marked and only got lost once with our map, but we were trying to use back roads.

We never really had a problem with parking either. In Salzburg we did park the car in the mountain and just used our feet for a couple days. You cannot drive in old Salzburg anyway.

You will have no problems

It was several years ago now and don't know if it's still the same or not, but back in the 80's, if you were on the Autobahn, you made sure you keep OUT of the left lane, giving way to the Porsche, coming at 180 MPH!!! <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Shocked.gif" alt="" />

Also a few years ago, but I rented a car and drove all over Germany, Austria, and other countries without a GPS and without problems. Even got my Peugeot station wagon up to 110 MPH on the autobahn once, just to say I did. That was too fast for me though. Watch out around some of the little towns. We did run across some roads that were quite narrow; in some cases only wide enough for one vehicle at a time. When you met someone, one of you had to pull off as far as possible to let the other pass.

Have fun, I enjoyed our time there.

The small towns are well worth seeing. We found parking everywhere, in fact our guide said we had parking angels!Rental cars often have GPS and the roads are all well marked.