I think you’re cutting your time in Europe short. With 6 total weeks I’d spend at least 2-2.5 on your side trips.
Vienna has Mozart concerts at a local theater that is really gorgeous. Problem is, I don’t know if they do them in the winter off-season. The Prater is nice, but again, I don’t know if it’s open in winter. The pubs are great, and make sure you fill up on wiener schnitzel while there.
If you’re coming frequently, this will really help:
Get the NS Reisplanner app on your phone. Even if 3g would expensive on your phone, most trains have wifi (just go to your browser, tick the box and log in). If you’re at a station you can usually use the wifi of a nearby train.
The app is set to Dutch, but go to “Instellingen” (icon: cog) Then go to “Taal”. There you can select English.
The app gives you very up-to-date information, it’s much better than the service announcements at the stations, which are rarely in Dutch. It’s also better than the signs. Very fast and very accurate.
Complaining about the NS is a national past-time, if you’ve been eating lots of cheese you might want to look down at your feet: are you wearing clogs? :eek: Ohooh, you’re turning Dutch!
You can also try the Sacher Torte at the Sacher Hotel. I would not recommend having them send one to someone back home. I did that and it was SOA (stale on arrival).
Do be aware that it’s the off season and parts of Versailles will be closed.
And yes, 10 days is far too short a time.
According to wiki:
That sounds really good. I’m gonna have to get around to making a redneck homemade version of this.
If your kids are animal lovers, I recommend the Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam. It’s all cat-themed art, with about a gazillion cats just wandering around the museum itself. My trip to Amsterdam was the longest I’d ever been away from my cats, and I was sorely missing some kitty love by our last couple days. (To be perfectly honest, I was also stoned out of my mind, but hey, kitties!!)
That’s the one. They’re a little bit heavy on the Empress Sisi stuff, IMO, but I guess it sells admissions, and it’s worth the tour regardless. Sad I missed the riding school–it’s on the agenda for next time. Vienna and Prague have been my favorite European cities to date. 
Oh… hmm. There’s also the actual amusement park that features in The Third Man, but I’m not sure it’d be open over winter.
They drive on the regular side IIRC (well…unless you’re English).
I don’t like driving in foreign countries though. When my buddy and I were driving around the Netherlands, we kept getting lost because the scale of the map was weird to our American sensibilities and we kept driving off the edge of it. Also we couldn’t read any of the road signs.
We also tried visiting The Hague, but as far as we could tell, it was just a bunch of boring administrative government buildings.
If you’re in Amsterdam you could visit Peter Greenaway. Better hurry, though, because I heard in 9 years he’s going to off himself.
I was thinking more of situations outside the normal, like all train services shut down between Sloterdijk and Schiphol during a whole weekend for rail works. We had some problems finding out what was going on. Even more fun is that we had taken a walk from Sloterdijk to Amsterdam Centraal only to find that we had to change to a bus service when we came back there by train. Signs telling passengers what to do and where to go were practically non existent in both Dutch and English.
If you’re into libraries you can always go to Haarlem and visit the Railway Station Library.
I found I didn’t really have all that much trouble with signs in the Netherlands. Everything seemed to me to be close enough to English that I could at least figure out the root of what they were saying.
Although the fact that multiple giraffes were called “giraffen” made me giggle for like half an hour. But again … I was really stoned.
Thanks guys! I’m busily noting it all…
I know a week and a half really is a bit too short. The constraints are: a) It’s actually just 4 weeks in Europe, then we fly out to Taiwan on the way home to do 2 weeks of language study with a group from school, and b) My parents are in England and it’s the first time we’ve visited them in 10 years. So there’s a limit to the amount of time we can run away for! But we’re going to make sure to enjoy ourselves for what time we have.