Hello to everyone here at r/travel!
I am an 18 year old former exchange student from Germany who is planning on traveling through Europe with friends that I made during my exchange year in Yakima, Washington. All of us love the idea of doing that after our graduation next year in late July. We, a group of 6, planned on starting the journey in Berlin and travel through Europe for a month and I have taken it upon myself to plan the trip for all of us, which turns out to be more difficult than I anticipated. Now to refer back to the title, I really need your help with figuring out what kind of transportation to use and where to stay (e.g. which places we should definitely visit), especially because we are on a budget of $3000 (which is about 2300€) due to the fact, that we are just finishing high school. If any of you have already traveled through Europe on that kind of budget - what would you recommend us? What should we expect from our plan? Or is the budget simply not enough?
I've already been to Barcelona and Prague and just fell in love with those cities and would like to include them into trip somehow. We decided on leaving England out, because it would be too money- and time-consuming, but being able to visit at least Paris and Rome as two examples of classic (maybe even a little cliché) European cities would definitely be awesome.
I already looked into offers like the different Eurail Passes, but there might be even cheaper alternatives that I might not know about.
Thanks a lot in advance for sharing your experience with me! I hope that we can find a way to make the trip unforgettable and show the people from the USA the beautiful aspects of Europe.