Hi, am looking for recommendations on a good area to stopover in for a couple of nights whilst driving from Tours to Nice - October.
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San Diego, California, USA
1097 posts
Hello cjkltaylor, I think you may need to supply some more information to get some good advice. Are you looking to stop a couple of nights in one place or break the trip up into thirds? What are your interests? Small towns, big sights?
I've never done this drive but it seems to be about 5 hours or so to Lyon which makes good sense if you want to see France's third biggest city and center of cuisine. The city is lit up at night and features some of French's best restaurants and a bunch of other excellent ones. Big cities have pluses and minuses for drivers since you need to navigate the city itself to your hotel etc.
If small towns are your thing you're about six hours from Provence and bunch of charming towns and small hills towns depending on whether you're okay with getting "off course" and detouring to a small town along the way.
If you want generic advice I would say 5 hours to Lyon for a night then 3 hours to Aix-en-Provence for a night and then a couple of hours to Nice. This gives you a big city and charming smaller town for your drive experience.
You could take the coast road for a more scenic - but certainly more traffic filled even in October - road trip. I've done the drive from Toulon to Saint-Tropez and it takes patience at times. I've also driven in Nice and surrounding areas and even in off season it takes some patience. Parking Nice is way worse than driving, BTW, just park in the underground lots.
You're probably looking at getting dark around 7:00 or 7:30 so keep that in mind for driving in a foreign country and scheduling.
Hope that helps,
=Tod