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Home Base for Normandy/ Mont Saint Michel road trip w/infant

Hello everyone!
My husband and I are planning a ten day trip to London and then Northern France mid-May with our will-be 9 month old daughter. Our current plan is to take the Eurostar on a Saturday and rent a car from Gare du Nord to drive into Normandy. (No desire to stay in Paris, we’ve both been multiple times. And we feel pretty good about driving out of Paris; we live downtown in Boston and have driven in Scotland and Santorini before).

We want to spend 5-6 nights in France. We’d like to visit Etretat, Honfleur, D-Day beaches, maybe Rouen, and of course Mont Saint Michel over 5 days. Perhaps Saint Malo as well but could leave that.
Any recommendations on a town or particular manor/bed and breakfast:apartment style lodgings we should stay in to be able to hit some of these sites in Normandy/Bretagne over several day trips? Or is there nothing central enough and better off doing three nights in one area and two nights in another spot?

Thank you so much for your recommendations! Very excited to travel with our baby!

Posted by
1227 posts

Normandy is a large area, and the sites you mention are mostly at opposite ends. It is almost a three hour drive between Étretat or Rouen and Mont-Saint-Michel (all of Brittany is further). If you want to stay in one place for all of those places, I highly recommend Bayeux. It is almost equidistant between the sites you mention and is a wonderful, half-timbered, medieval town. Many restaurants, and very convenient to the D-day sights too. Caen is also in the middle, but I find it to be a modern, boring, industrial city lacking the charm of much of the rest of Normandy.