I think you need to cut, but you need to work out the transportation first. I love Ljubljana, but Budapest-Ljubljana-Prague would not be a fast or easy trek — how are you planning to travel?

Ljubljana is one of my favorites, but OL is right — that’s not easy…

I’m from the UK so can get an Inter Rail ticket, so will be travelling on trains.

To be honest it’s just a rough plan, and I’ve heard great stuff about Ljubljana so put it in. I haven’t realy looked a logistics yet and feasability, but just kinda getting the general jist of what folk think is possible/would try to avoid doing.

That’s a lot to cram into 22 days. I’d cut out a bunch of that stuff. Try doing 3-4 days in each city not counting travel time. Does your $$ include train ticket? If so, then your budget is not feasible. If not, then your budget, while tight, is doable.

I would takre out London as it is very expensive, and as you live in the UK anyway, you will have opportunity to go there some other time.

Also, Stuttgart is not the most interesting city in Germany. Either skip it or replace it with Munich.

Maybe it would indeed be better to concentrate on Cetral Europe for your trip, and do Amsterdam & Paris another time, perhaps for weekend breaks by discounted plane tickets.

I would agree about replacing Stuttgart with a place like Munich. Stuttgart isn’t that cool unless you have an actual reason for being there. It would also help to if you did something like Budapest-Munich-Ljubljana because you could do it with night trains. I’d second guess going to Prague too, since a lot of what people used to like about it is found now more in small town Czech Rep, like Cesky Krumlov for instance. But that said, I don’t really know of a quick way to get there, since it would still be about 6 hours or more from Munich, and I don’t know of any night trains on that route.

Only other thing I’d say is if you’re on a night train in the east, keep a close eye on your shit. I don’t buy all the “people get gassed!” talk, but the fact of the matter is the train service out there is a lot less sleek than it is in the west; the cars are older, and everything just feels haphazard. I was holding my breath all night when I had to give my passport to the “conductor” on a train from Ljubljana to Stuttgart (yeah I know what I said earlier, haha). The guy looked like he doubled as the 19th century dude shoveling coal into the furnace. I really felt like if I spoke a Slavic language, I could have walked through the train cars myself and stolen people’s passports and stuff. I haven’t had one trip yet where I didn’t meet someone who had something stolen on a night train in the east; not saying that everyone has this happen (it didn’t to me, after all) but everyone at least has some kind of weird story after the fact, like this couple I met whose train stopped every 15 minutes and gypsies kept jumping on and off the train trying to jimmy open the cabin doors.

Anyway, now that I’ve deterred you from visiting the continent…. have fun!

EDIT: Oh also, I’m not sure if there’s a direct night train between Krakow and Budapest either. You might want to look into that because trust me… as crazy as a night full of gypsy fueled mayhem can be, I’d take that over having to get out of my bunk at 3 AM to sit at a station in the middle of nowhere and hope the next train shows up on time.