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Reaching Chamonix

Posted by (North Carolina) on

I am in the beginning stages of planning for a June trip to France. We will be flying into Marseille and spending a week around Provence. We want to finish out with several days in the Alps and especially Chamonix (then take a shuttle and fly out of Geneva). I plan on renting a car in Avignon for Provence and I wanted to just return it there and finish the trip via train (Have a night planned in Valence, then on to one night in Lyon). However it looks like to get to Chamonix from Lyon takes 2 connections and my mind starts worrying about missing one of them.

Looking for opinions on what would be your preferred travel for a family of 3 with 1 carry-on suitcase each.

  • Train from Lyon with 2 connections
  • Keep the rental car and drive from Valence or Lyon to Chamonix

Editing my original post to say that I have just found that there is an evening train with only 1 connection, so now I am considering that, but am still interested in others' thoughts

Timing seems about the same if i want to drive and avoid A40.
Paying the extra fee for returning the car to a different city is not a serious turn-off for me.

Have you taken this train trip and found it difficult at all?

Thanks!

Posted by
12 posts

I am doing a similar trip in June--a bit longer, starting in Paris, then making our way down to Provence, and ending in Chamonix. I looked into all the options and the cheapest and fastest way to get from the South of France to Chamonix is to fly Easy Jet from Nice to Geneva. It's a super quick 1 hour flight, roughly $150 per person USD including checked bags and seat selection. Much easer than spending the whole day and multiple connections via train. We are then renting a car at GVA and driving to Chamonix, roughly 90 mins. drive. We will drive ourselves back and return the car to fly out of GVA for our flight home. I'm not sure about Easy Jet's routes from Frances other southern airports, but I would look into it!

Posted by
647 posts

The train, while scenic, is slow, and because the track gauge changes as you head into
the mountains, requires at least one (I thought it was usually 2) connections, depending on
how far into the Chamonix valley you want to go. I will say that the connections are easy
with only a carryon. The amount of crowds on the train will obviously vary.

So, if you don't mind the dropoff charge, and have a place to park the car in Chamonix,
that seems like a reasonable plan.

Another option would be to look at buses. You could either take Flixbus from Lyon Perrache,
or take the train to Geneva and catch a bus from the airport or downtown station. Buses
are usually pretty comfortable in Europe and very reasonably priced.

Posted by
34 posts

Thank you for the ideas. That's a couple things I hadn't thought about and will check them out.

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