Please sign in to post.

Paris or Normandy car rental recommendation?

Hello all-I have a dilemma of sorts with our plans to get from Paris to Normandy and pick up a rental car. We are leaving Paris on a Sunday and I already know we can't pick up a car on Sunday in Caen. My original plan was to take a train to Bayeux for the night (we are staying 2 nights) and then pick it up the car on Monday morning in Caen (train to Caen). But we want to do a full D-Day tour on Monday so we won't have time to pick up the car before the tour starts. We can get the car in Caen on Tuesday, which is my current backup plan. I am wondering about another option which is to pick up a car at Gare Du Nord on Sunday and drive to Bayeux, bypassing Caen completely. We didn't necessarily want to drive in Paris, but am now considering it as we already have plans to go to Gare Du Nord around 11 am to drop off a family member for a Eurostar train, so it may make sense to just get it there, plus its a Sunday so traffic won't be as bad, possibly. There will be 3 of us in the car, the cost of a rental car is not that much different for Gare Du Nord pickup vs Caen. Has anyone done this drive and is it awful? I know the train is faster but maybe the drive would be nice once we left Paris proper, and we could stop somewhere along the way. RS/France experts-what would you do? Train to Normandy or drive? My Thanks!

(We are getting a car so we can go to Mont St Michel and Loire after Normandy)

Posted by
4394 posts

If you are asking about the drive out of Paris, that is not too bad if you have a GPS and can follow instructions. What we did was make sure that our best navigator (me) was in the front passenger seat doing things like noting how many lights the driver would go through before a turn, etc so he could focus on the driving and we followed the GPS instructions. Most recently, we did this on a weekday morning at around 11 AM and it was not a problem, My guess is that a Sunday might have less traffic but perhaps some roads might be closed for whatever random reason. If that happens, and you cannot follow the GPS directions, it will recalculate based on what you did because there are always multiple ways to get to any point.