Any Advice For My Itinerary?

I assume you plan multiple day-trips from Colmar. It's a good base, in addition to being very pretty (though touristy).

From my perspective your timing seems reasonable.

I have one suggestion for Aix-en-Provence if you're interested in 20th-century history: the Camp des Milles WWII internment camp, from which people were sent on to Drancy and then on to concentration and death camps in eastern Europe. A very good, modern museum--with almost all the material presented in English as well as in French--has been established at the site of the camp. In addition to revealing what happened there, the museum also focuses on the question of how it could have happened in France. If you want to read all the information provided, you'll be there more than two hours, I think. The lower level of the building was quite chilly in mid-summer, so be sure to take a wrap. The camp is about 4 miles from the center of Aix; city-bus service to that area isn't extremely frequent, but the buses run often enough to be workable.

acraven, thanks for the information about Camp des Milles. It sounds right up my alley.

Yes, we plan to use Colmar as a base to see Strasbourg, wine villages and probably more. I know that March is not the ideal time to be there and what we choose to do and which day we do it will be weather dependent.

Is there any financial or other benefit to purchasing local train tickets in advance?

Not unless you have a segment on something like a TGV or IC. If the schedule says it's a TER, the fare doesn't vary with date of purchase. I ran into lines to use the ticket-vending machines at the Nice-Ville station in May a few years ago. I learned I needed to either buy my ticket the night before or allow some extra time in the morning. However, that was an unusual experience.

On the TERs, the departure time of a train can affect the fare; rush hours and peak holiday-travel periods cost more. When appropriate, the ticket-vending machine will give you an option to select either Blue Period or White Period. There should be a little schedule showing the blue and white periods posted on ticket-vending machines, but those are sometimes too worn to read. Here's the current SNCF calendar: http://medias.sncf.com/sncfcom/pdf/calendrier/calendriervoyageur.pdf . There will be a new one before your trip. With luck you'll be able to locate it by Googling SNCF calendrier if that link stops working.

From your itinerary it appears you will be on some fast trains, at least on days when you shift hotels. You stand to save quite a bit of money if you dare to buy those tickets early. In any case, you wouldn't want to wait until the last minute unless you absolutely had to, because those trains can sell out.

Thanks for the train information. When I looked at dummy dates I could see the price difference. Price will definitely dictate which trains we take.

Don't forget to select the senior-citizen rate from the ticket machine! France doesn't require any special "carte" bought in advance.

But sometimes there's a larger discount if you do have the card, and I think there are occasions when there's a discount available with the card and none at all without. They really wouldn't be able to get away with selling the cards if there was never any benefit to them. Andrea's doing enough moving around on what look like they could be TGVs that the card could very well save money. No way to tell without pricing out every ticket.

Good call about getting senior prices. I will qualify, but hubby won’t. Any discount is a good discount. I will look into getting the card.

SNCF is streamlining the discounts and card system. Stay tuned. Maybe someone will give a summary.

sounds like a nice itinerary.

4 nights in Lyon is about right, that is how much time we spent there. We stayed in Beaune for 4 nights and did a day trip to Dijon. I enjoyed the atmosphere of Beaune more as it was walkable and lots of great restaurants. But Dijon is a nice town to walk around in.

Bets, thanks for the heads up.

Rizell, we quite enjoyed Beaune. One goal for this trip is to see new places. Except Paris. There’s no such thing as too much time in Paris.

Well, I realized I went a little crazy with add ons to my original plan and that it could eventually come back to bite us Schengen-wise when planning our late-summer to fall 2022 trip. We just changed our arrival flight and we will now get to Frankfurt on March 21.

This is the new plan in this order:

Frankfurt - 2 nights
Family time - 7 nights
Colmar - 4 nights
Lyon - 4 nights
Nice - 5 nights
Montpellier- 3 nights
Carcassonne - 2 nights
Paris - 7 nights
Haarlem - 7 nights

I hated to give up the other places and extra nights that I cut and I wasn’t happy when reality set in, but hard choices must be made sometimes. Lol! Thanks for all the help provided.