Lucy

Record the state on every sale from today. That is the entire job until a number gets big, and the version of you in two years will be very glad the data exists.

Count travel days honestly and the answer usually appears by itself. A two hour train is not two hours, it is check out by 11, get to the station, travel, arrive, cannot check in until 15:00, drag bags around or pay for storage. Call it half a day gone each time. Three cities with two moves costs you a full day out of nine.

With three nights per city you get two full days in each, which is a genuinely good ratio and I would take that over a day trip. Day trips to a city two hours away leave you with about five hours there and a lot of it spent watching the clock.

Where I would change my mind is your partner. If packing and moving is what exhausts them, two bases wins even at the cost of a shallower visit to the third.

Agreed on the three night minimum as a rule. We differ mostly on how much the packing itself costs, which depends entirely on the people involved.

It is called dynamic currency conversion and it is the single most common small ripoff in travel. The terminal makes it look like a helpful option.

Keep a small stash of low value notes accessible for the first hour after you land, for a locker, a bus ticket or a bottle of water. Arriving with only a large note is a surprisingly common minor disaster and it sets the tone for the whole first day.