Best of Eastern France

Hi!
What are your doubts? What do you need to know?

The direct trains from CDG serve "Champagne-Ardenne" station, on the outskirts of Reims. It is connected to the city centre by light rail (although I think there are works this summer), else a taxi won't be expensive but I do not know if they routinely wait at the station.

There aren't that many connections per day; if I remember correctly there are some before 12 and one or two at the end of the day.

So, if you land towards late morning/early afternoon, you might need to travel to Paris-Gare de l'Est and take a train to Reims-Ville (or Reims-Centre, I always forget the exact name of the station) from there.

For most but the thriftiest travellers, the best way to travel from the airport to Gare de l'Est is a taxi (fixed rate, 53€ up to 4 adults).

And the train tickets are best pre-booked (cheaper!). But since you cannot take a later train if you miss your scheduled one, you need to allow for 3 hours between landing and train departure time at CDG, and 4 hours if train departure is at Gare de l'Est.

Yes, we caught the fast train to Reims from CDG in May. We booked ahead and allowed the 3 hours between landing and catching our train as balso suggests. He is giving you the particulars as we experienced them. The four of us shared a taxi from Champagne-Ardenne to the hotel and it wasn’t very expensive. You can also go into Paris and take a train from the station there but we found that to be more complicated and a longer journey than the 30 minute trip from CDG, even including the taxi to hotel time.