Have you given your local German Christmas market a little too much love this season already? If you’re feeling that way, maybe you need to strike out across the border.  I recently stumbled across a nifty little Web site offering information on Christmas-related events in the Alsace. So, if you’re in the market for a market, or Marché de Noël, in neighboring France, pay a visit to http://noel.tourisme-alsace.com/en/events/. You’ll even find an event or two stretching past Christmas day, if you are one to suffer from post-holiday blues.

Looking for some cheap air tickets?  Here are a couple of good deals I have found for those residing in Germany. But you’ll need to be faster than a speeding bullet to take advantage of them.  

Perhaps you’ve been toying with the idea of visiting a Christmas market, but the potential of a long drive through freezing rain holds little appeal. In that case, you could do worse than to plan a hotel-inclusive weekend getaway by train. German Rail presently has several offers to some of the country’s best loved Christmas markets, including those in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Hanover, Basel, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Leipzig. For details, click here.

Are you ready for some German Christmas market magic? Fun as those regular commercial ones dotting virtually every city center can be, sometimes you might yearn for something that appears, at least on the surface, a little more traditional.

In your quest to see as much of Europe as possible within a limited time frame and on a budget, do you get frustrated when the best deals on flights always seem to be to the same destination? For example, Prague, London and Rome are cities to which it’s fairly easy to find a bargain fare. But just try to find a cheap flight to Corsica or Sicily — it’s nigh-on impossible, any time of the year. So what’s a good work-around solution?

According to the newly launched Web site germanoriginality.com, more than 42 million Americans can trace their roots back to Germany. If you count yourself amongst this number, and you are interested in finding more about your heritage, this Web site could provide you with a friendly introduction to exploring your ancestry. Links to genealogical resources make up only one part of the site, which represents a joint endeavor of the German National Tourist Office, the German Information Center USA, and other partners. Other features include tidbits of information concerning Americans of German heritage- for example, did you know that Elvis Aaron Presley’s surname was anglicized from the German name Pressler?

In addition to rock-bottom service at rock-bottom prices, budget airlines allow us to explore the concept of one-way flights. I had long dreamed of devising an itinerary that would whisk me into one city and out of another, but it was only several weeks ago that I finally made the idea reality. Our chosen route took us into Faro, Portugal, and saw us returning to home base Germany via Malaga, Spain, flying with Ryanair. Since Ryanair and many other budget airlines sell flights as separate, one way-segments, there's no need to pay a pricey surcharge for the privilege of choosing different arrival and departure airports. The five-day itinerary was busy, but shy of what I’d term hectic.

I returned from my most recent trip just last week. The flight to Faro, Portugal, came courtesy of Ryanair. For the pleasure of this flight, which took place the last Monday in September out of Frankfurt Hahn, I ended up paying a grand total of 120.18 euros (99.99 euros for airfare, 15.19 euros in taxes, and 5 euros for airport check-in, mandatory for holders of U.S. passports.)

I was foolish to spend that much, because when I started tracking that flight about one month prior to its departure date, the price for the flight only, minus extras and taxes, was somewhere around 29.99 euros. On the other hand, I was actually pretty clever. If I had booked that flight less than a week prior to travel, I could have ended up spending as much as 159.99 euros for the airfare alone.