u/Familiar_Percentage7

We're traveling by train, seems like too much hassle to rent a car, so our travel through the Alps is based on where rail stations are, which is city centers, but we want lots of outdoors time. We've decided to splurge on 2 nights at Castel Hörtenburg (Sunday and Monday last week of May). On Sunday we're traveling from Vipiteno... not sure if we have to preplan the train d.t. holiday crowds or choose based on vibes. After we check out and have breakfast on Tuesday we're going to visit Ötzi at the museum and catch an afternoon high speed to Florence. So approximately 1.5 days.

We sadly have only a short stay bc this trip is a train buffet and if we fall in love with a particular region we'll do a long trip with a car and everything. So any day trip requiring even more travel from our base has to be on Monday, which is coincidentally a holiday (Pentecost/whit Monday) with lots of German tourists and closures so I'm not sure how this affects things. Plus Mondays is the day lots of museums close. So if we can only do the highlights, how should we prioritize?

We can hike a few hours of hilly terrain but one of us has a connective tissue disease and the other a recovering wrist injury so probably no climbing courses. The hotel offers ebikes but idk the details.

We're planning to take full advantage of a rail pass this month and we're going to spend a solid week migrating southward, avoiding long rides because one of us has RLS, but 2 hours bracketed by a little hassle with luggage is a fine interruption for us and we don't mind if our neurology means doing this every few days. So we're going to be arriving in Vipiteno early one morning, staying a night, and when we leave the next day (since we can store luggage after checkout) depends on how much there is to do there that wasn't already done vs what we can enjoy in other locations on our route. We've already got I think a total of 4 nights booked between Florence and Rome hotels, which is going to max out the amount of time I want to be in big city crowds. But Vipiteno to Firenze looks like it will be too long to sit through straight through (and too short/too many transfers for a night train), plus we're going to pass by Dolomites, Lake Garda, and the Tuscan countryside so it seems better to break up the journey by picking one or more of those destinations to stay a night or two.

I could use some help figuring out how the trains work though because I think my searches are picking up bad AI-fueled info now. Like there's high speed rail but only from certain spots? And how often? Like two cities that are geographically further could actually be temporally nearer, but there is no simple tool to find that info.

And I don't want any guff about blah blah blah too many places on one itinerary. We know what we're about!

There's an art contest, they want everyone to watch the prelaunch stream on Saturday, you can "apply" to Alterra and if enough people do they'll add another blueprint to the game etc. Apologies if this is a repost, I'm not scrolling that far!