One night other than Nice

Antibes is worth more than a night. I encourage you to visit there after your stay in Nice. We had a car so can’t comment on trains.

Suki, thanks for your reply. We were considering leaving Nice and going to Antibes if there was much to do, then catching the train a day or two later from there to Avignon. We will try and do more research as to where to stay, what to do etc. Wanted something more than just Nice.

It takes as few as 18 minutes to get to Antibes by regional train from Nice; stopping there on the way to Avignon will only reduce the travel time to Avignon by a similarly short amount of time, should you decide to proceed next to Avignon. There's no way I'd want to uproot myself and change hotels in this situation. Maybe you find that process less annoying than I do.

Antibes is an attractive, atmospheric town. I suppose its major sight, other than the walled Old Town itself, is the Picasso Museum. On the day I visited it, Antibes wasn't as mobbed by tourists as I had feared it would be (and as Menton was). I hope you'll be equally lucky. I don't know that you'd want two nights there unless you planned to take a side trip outside the town, and any place that's a good side trip from Antibes would also be a good side trip from Nice.

ACraven, on that note, I am questioning our plan as we get closer to our trip. Is Avignon worth the effort? We originally wanted to go via rent car, but prices were absurd. So then we thought we would just fly back to Paris and skip it altogether. Now second thoughts - kind of. I don't think Avignon itself is the destination we were looking for, but some of the smaller towns were more appealing. Without a car, we are also quite limited on where to go. Is Lyon a better choice, or anywhere else in the Region? We had a couple of extra days before Paris, but is two nights enough in Nice, and take what would have been our third night and use it elsewhere?

I like Nice, but it's a big city. If you aren't interested in its six art museums, it may not be the best choice if you have pictured a cute coastal town. Its great as a base for seeing a bunch of different places along the coast by train (very easy and cheap) or some hill towns by bus (cheap but a bit trickier due to infrequency), but you don't have time to take a lot of side-trips, so that particular advantage Nice holds isn't of value to you.

I also like Avignon (some people do not rank it high), but most people want to see multiple places in Provence, not just one town. While you can see a lot of small places on the Riviera without a car (a car's an impediment in many cases), that's not the situation in Provence. If you want to go to the Luberon villages, for example, that means a car or perhaps a bus tour. And in any case, you don't have much time to play with.

A further complication in this case is that trains between Nice and Provence are not particularly fast. I think the deal is that the east-west rail line along the coast doesn't support the speeds at which TGVs usually run. This means trying to hit both areas (each worth 5 nights or more) in just a few days doesn't work particularly well. I'd choose the Riviera or Provence, not both. I would not recommend heading down to southern France for just 2 nights in Nice and 2 nights (perhaps) elsewhere.

I don't know what your total trip looks like, so I'm not sure what to recommend. However, I will say that Lyon is a really, really interesting city where you could probably spend 4 nights without running out of things to do. I stayed longer and want to go back. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't like Lyon.

Is Paris your only other French destination on this trip? Are you OK with having your second stop be a largish city? Lyon is larger than Nice.

Paris is the only other stop and we will be there five nights. We have been many, many times to Paris, and we are meeting someone there so that's set in stone. That gives us six more nights to work with elsewhere. We have already booked our ticket thru to Nice, but could easily call Air France and try and change the ticket as long as we do it soon. We feel so all over the place with this trip, much more so than all the other times we have been overseas. It just seems like it is a lot of work to "make it work." My good deal is becoming a headache! Maybe we should just spend the entire 11 nights in Paris and forget about it.

Marseille would be good for an overnight! It breaks the journey nicely, and it is very different from Nice.