Normandy for three days - tours and/or car rental

We (a group of 8) stayed 3 days in Bayuex at Hôtel d'Argouges.
We booked a one day tour to the Beaches of Normandy and Cemeteries and booked another
1 days tour to Mont St Michel.
We booked through viators.com for both. They are a consolidator and they hooked us up with
Normandy Tours (Normandy Sightseeing Tours). Our guide was Adrian and we were in a new 9 or 10 passenger van and he
was a great guide - really knew his history and customized for things we were interested in.
We went to several small towns near the beaches of Normandy and had a great lunch in
a restaurant that he recommended and even reserved for us.
We also spent a full day for the Mont St. Michel tour - again a wonderful and informative tour.
Here is a link to book directly with the actual tour company rather than Viator.com
Normandy Tours

If you are taking the Churchill Shuttle I assume that you are staying at the Churchill,I would do a D Day tour with Overlord and the pickup point is 300 feet from the hotel, the Tapestry Museum is close to the Hotel.With your trip to Mt St Michel you won't have time to rent a car.The town of Honfleur is worth seeing but you probably won't have time.
Mike

If you decide to hire a WWII guide in Normandy I recommend Ellwood Von Seibold, if you can reserve a tour with him on short notice. He was our WWII guide when I was on a Rick Steves tour and was amazing. His Web site is ddaybattletours.com.

We stayed at the Hotel Churchill, took the American DDay beaches day tour with Overlord and felt it was a great day. They will take you to the American cemetery and give you about 30 minutes to look around. We allowed ourselves 2 full days in Bayeux so that on the second day we could take our rental car and spend more time at the places we saw on the tour the day before. Let me urge you to see the British cemetery in Bayeux as well as the German cemetery if you get a chance. My husband is a history major and loves the WW2 history. We felt the three cemeteries gave us a better view of the war and all that happened. The British one is easy to walk to in Bayeux. They allowed the British war families to put personal messages on the gravestones and they will touch your heart as you read them, giving you insight to the ages of the soldiers they lost in Normandy. The American cemetery is beautiful and elegant, the British is filled with flowers and warm sentiments and the German is as cold as it can be......really interesting! The Bayeux tapestry is really worth the trip too!

We have recently returned. We stayed two nights in Bayeux at Hotel Reine Mathilde. It is near the cathedral and Place Quebec. This was a convenient location to take the Churchill shuttle to Mont St Michel and to meet up with our D-Day beaches tour guide Roel. We did a full day tour, and it was the two of us and another couple. It was the highlight of our trip, and Roel was extremely knowledgeable. His website is www.victorytours.com. Just a note, I did reserve spots on both the shuttle and the tour before hand. Bon voyage!

normandy-44tours was good for us, you get picked up, no need for your own vehicle.

My sister and I will be in Bayeux 2nd week of October, staying 4 nights at Hotel Maison. We'll spend a leisurely day walking around the town, go to the WWII museum, British cemetery, journalist memorial... Next day we've got a full-day tour with Overlord - their Omaha/Band of Brothers tour. And the last day am renting a car to see parts we either didn't get to on the tour or want to spend more time at. This will be my 5th time in Bayeux and my sister's first. We're both WWII history buffs, so can't wait to show her around.

I can recommend Sylvain Kast as a guide in Normandy. We hired him for a private tour and he was phenomenal! He will tailor the tour to your interests. We have a family member who was in Normandy during the invasion, and Sylvain did additional research for us before our tour. http://www.d-day-experience-tours.com/tours/

I would encourage you to do an extensive use of the Search box at top center. You have asked the most frequently discussed question about "Normandy" - which here seems to mean "American invasion Normandy." Probably 70% of posts rave about the vet who gave them an elaborate tour of the major sites, the other 30% (including me) who got three guidebooks and decided what to do themselves, in some cases doing something (like descending a risky cliffiside path) that a tour might not do.

The other question is "car or no car". But the answer has more to do with the first choice than general car questions. If you were to rent a car locally, you could return it with less than 40 miles on it - desire to drive in a foreign country (or other concerns) are secondary for such a compact set of sites.

(I'm not chiding you about the Search box, rather I'm pointing out that you can get dozens of comments, that you won't find in a single thread for your own question.)