Hi everyone,
We are heading out of Paris on Sunday morning and need to pick up a rental car to head to Loire Valley.
We are competent with stick shift and plan to return the car to CDG. We are thinking it best to pick up at a south location though. Any advice where that rental car pick up should be?
We just took the TGV to Tours (St Pierre des Corps) and picked up/returned the car at that station. Took the train back to Paris.
Hi CJean,
Where did you pick up the TGV?
Went to www.ouigo.com but seems it is only in french.
Thank you
There are several in town officers where you can pickup a rental on Sunday morning. It´s very easy to exit Paris and pickup A6/A10 to the Loire Valley.
Picking up at a train station will add a 40.80€ fee payable at drop off. This fee, among others, is not included in most quotes.
You may book Ouigo in English here.
We took the Metro to a rental agency near Port Orleans (southern edge of Paris ring road), which was right next to the freeway entrance. The rental place was a few blocks from the metro stop, so if you have a lot of luggage that could be harder (we wore backpacks). Be warned they are closed for lunch 12-1 (or was it 2)... we arrived at 12:05 (oops)
When we had to pick up a car on a Sun morning in Paris, we used the Europcar located on Ave Foch (#8). It was easy to get to from the metro, and was on the 'other' side of the Arc de Triomphe, so we didn't have to circle it. It was fairly easy to get to the 'ring' road. We went the day before so we would be able to find it - which was good, since it was underground and we were confused for a moment or three about the address.
You may or may not be lucky with gps. Both the cars we rented in France had integrated gps.
We didn't want to chance it for our rental in July, so we just got some France/Benelux maps for our Garmin. If you don't have one at home, and don't want to pay per day for one from the rental company...if you rent via AutoEurope, they will send one to you to take with you. I looked into it for us, but because it was to be FedEx'd to us in Canada (and returned via Fed Ex) and with the crappy exchange rate it was going to cost about $55, and we were able to get the maps for our own gps from Amazon for the same price.
I think GPS is essential...even just for mapping, keeping track of your speed, knowing how long you have until you get to your destination, knowing about traffic delays or alternate routes if there are detours. (Last time we rented, we hit some bad rain storms and local flooding...our route to our accoms was closed, so using the gps we were able to find an alternate). Some people do use google maps or whatnot on their smartphones. I don't know much about that as we don't own a smartphone.
I third the TGV to Tour/SPdCorps option. I've done it twice - very nice way to go. For gps, we bought a used TomTom on ebay with French maps. $30 - drove over 2,000 km around france with it. Best value ever.
We took the train to Chartres and spent the evening there enjoying the city and the cathedral and then picked up a rental car the next day and proceeded to the Loire.
