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Driving from Paris with rental car

Posted by (Last Frontier aka Alaska 🏔️) on

So what do you do when you have your trips planned for 2019? You start working on 2020 of course! My DH and I would like to visit Paris and Normandy in April of 2020. Background; my DH lived in Paris for a few months while working on EuroDisney. I spent 2 days there over 30 years ago (yheah, time to go back). I have ordered RS Normandy and Paris book and am awaiting their arrival. Here is my preliminary plan and would love feedback. Total nights that we have for this trip is 13 or 14.

Arrive CDG and pick up rental car and drive to Giverny (not sure what time we will arrive, but would like to not split up Paris nights and I think will be fine with a 1 hour drive to Giverny)
Questions-how hard is it to pick up rental car and get out on the road towards Giverny ( our first stop)????
Should we overnight in Giverny after visiting the gardens? If so, where?

Posted by
8049 posts

I'd do St. Malo instead of either Honfleur or Rouen -- although both are also great. But there are so many beautiful spots near MSM --

Posted by
4044 posts

Giverny itself is barely a hamlet. To see what is nearby, try Google Maps for the village, click on Nearby and then on Hotels. You can go further afield than the average day-tripper since you have a car.

Posted by
16893 posts

I would program your GPS or Google Maps for a route via Pontoise, on smaller roads. Recently, we let the GPS choose a route from the Rouen area to CDG and it took us onto the Paris ring road, with so many highway mergers that I had not wanted to do then and would not want to do on the first day off the plane.

Posted by
473 posts

We drove from cdg to Chartres this past June. Picking up car rental is easy. Have a good mapping app, we used google and ViaMichelin. Make sure you have coins for the toll roads. Check with auto Europe. Great prices. Get full coverage and enjoy. We used hertz. Happy planning

Posted by
6531 posts

Picking up the rental is easy, and since you won’t have to drive close in to Paris, getting to Giverny (or wherever you ultimately decide to spend your first night) should be easy.

Posted by
22 posts

Last time I booked a car in Paris, I reserved automatic transmission (via Europcar) and got a manual w/upgrade option to Mercedes, which was the only car they had with auto. Not saying it happens frequently, just something to watch out for.... (I just took the stick, but the Mercedes option would've more than doubled the price).

Aside from that, I didn't have any issues w/car in Paris. Driving from the Louvre to Giverny was fine, I imagine the drive from the airport would be as well. Paris roads are FILLED with motorcycles/scooters/bikes, so sharing the road is key in the city.

I'd stay in Giverny - can't say enough about how beautiful the place is. There is a b&b - La Pluie de Roses - which is built in a similar style with a garden and a pond... you can live Claude Monet's life a bit.

Posted by
139 posts

We did a similar trip but went from Normandy to Giverny. Took a D Day tour from a former Disney employee, told him we were planning to stay somewhere on the way back from Normandy near Giverny and he wasn't convinced there were many good places to stay. Then I pulled out my notes and told him we were staying in Les Andelys and he said, Ahh....Les Andelys!

It's about a half hour drive to Giverny, also on the Seine. We had a view of a castle from Richard the Lionheart days out the bedroom window.

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