Stops along the way driving from Dinan to Paris on the last Saturday of July

Just south of Dol-de-Bretagne (some 30km east of Dinan) there is the Menhir du Champ-Dolent and that´s quite a big one, well the biggest in Brittany. The story goes that it sinks step by step into the bottom and when it is completely vanished that will be the end of the world, so don’t wait too long.....

1) With stops it is certainly doable to drive back in one day to Paris from Dinan. In Paris it depends where you have to drop off the car, that will be your only worry in terms handling the situation.

2) Best is to enjoy places in the way they are. Brittany and Normandy has a very different character as the Provence, but has plenty places to enjoy. The ramparts of Saint Malo are nice but really loved most the view over the surrounding sea. And can really recommend the drive along the coast between St Malo end Cancale. Last week I made a stop at the Havre de Rothéneuf and is absolutely stunning. If you drive from Cancale to Dol-de-Bretagne you can make a stop at Mont Dol for a panoramic view over the surrounding flat land with ofcourse also Le Mont-Saint-Michel at the horizon.

3) On the way back to Paris worth a stop is Beuvron-en-Auge, the surrounding countryside is really nice for a tour. Ofcourse Honfleur and more west Deauville. Rouen is worth a stop too but is not so easy to drive through.

Yes, stop in St. Malo. Be sure you have all your hotel and restaurant reservations set as that is the heaviest vacation weekend of the year. Traffic into Paris will be very heavy on Sunday, a little less so on Saturday, but still expect places to be crowded. It will be bogged down and sometimes very bogged. Autoroute reststops will be crowded. OTOH it's easy to drive in Paris because so many people are away.

Edit: thanks to Tim's post I picked up that you want to do all this leaving Paris on Friday and returning on a Saturday. Time to go back to the drawing board and start all over. You'll hit a lot of places but see and experience nothing. Reverse your order and drop some of it. If you want to experience the D-Day beaches, join a good tour--Overlord, or another good one. Otherwise you'll waste too much time looking, parking. It's much richer with a good guide. To do this, leave Paris by train for Rennes and pick up a car. Drive to St. Malo for lunch. Go on to Mt. St. Michel for a visit. Drive on to Bayeux where you drop the car and spend the night ready for an organized tour at 8:30 the next morning. Have the tour leader drop you at the train station for a late train back to Paris. There are logistics such as the opening hours of the one car rental in Bayeux and how to get back into town from there, but you should be able to figure it out.

As it is now, you are allowing only a couple hours for the beaches which cover a fifty mile front. So your second choice would be to keep your plan to pick up a car in Caen but realize that you can't really experience the beaches. Then go on with your plan to wake up on Mt. St. Michel, and go to St. Malo the next day but instead turn the car in at the Rennes train station and take the train back to Paris.

As for dolmens-- they are everywhere. One or two in a field or someone's front yard is not the same as Carnac or Stonehenge. That will have to be or another trip, as will Dinan, the Bayeux tapestry, and maybe even the beaches.

Everyone has a different travel style. Your first few sentences don't make it clear whether you're talking about two nights in the West, or maybe one. I'd believe it's one because you have set such a grueling, sit-in-the-car schedule for yourselves. We didn't get to the West coast until our seventh time in France, and we spent half our vacation there.

I think it is unrealistic to talk about "stops during the 4 to 5 hour drive." What I mean is that it will take you 15-20 minutes to get off the highway and into one of these towns or cities, and hopefully, park. That means 15 minutes to get back on the highway. (I might add that we spent a lot of time looking for the Menhir named above. It's much easier with coordinates in your GPS: (48.535032 ,-1.739114).)

We happen to like public gardens, so we stopped at some on our way back to Paris. But those are even harder to get to from the highway, and it takes at least an hour, often more, to visit one. How long would it take to visit Chartres ..... .... ? Here's the list from our Brittany/Normandy trip. We got to 2/3 of them, and that was in several days of driving and day trips from our multiple three-night locations: Dol-de-Bretagne menhir, M.S.M.,Dinan,St. Malo,Paimpol steam train/Beauport Abbey/moonlight walk Gardens: Coutances, La Ballue,Chateau de Caradeuc, Jardin Thabor, … de Beaumesnil, … de Bizy ...Vitré, Coutances or Cider Route.

I think it would be wiser to think about what you want the most, medieval city, hike in the mountains, public garden, cider route, missed WW II monument, Michelin restaurant, art museum, Giverny, Chartres, harbor boat ride ...... and focus on that one stop.

Edit: St. Malo is on a peninsula. So with traffic and difficult parking, you'd be lucky to get to the gates of the city in half an hour from the highway. And you have to negotiate the same route back to the highway.

Thank you all for your suggestions! Our real intention for this out of Paris trip was to see the D-Day beaches and MSM. But after reading so many posts, new places seemed so amazing that I wanted to add them in. I already have our train tickets for Caen for an early train - 7:05 am - so we will have to go that route. The trains gets us to Caen just before 9:00 am and I have a car booked for pickup then. I thought we would go to the D-Day beaches that day. I agree with you that I should hire a guide so I will look into that. Never having done this, I was expecting to spend about 6 hour touring the beaches - am I way off? Then heading to MSM to see it at night - maybe catch some daylight views since I think the sun is out until at least 9:00 pm. We are booked at a B&B just a few miles from MSM.

Next day is very flexible since I have not booked any train and I have the car for 3 days due to minimum rental requirement. So this is where I have spent several days looking at post to see if we should drop the car off at Rennes and take the train back to Paris or drive all the way back to Paris. My husband and daughter want us to drive. My head was spinning from the research so I figured I would ask the experts!

A note about our family: we usually do cruises so we are used to the crazy sightseeing days. I think I need to step away from the cruise mentality! We also live in an area of the US where there is heavy traffic. Being stuck in a car for several hours is normal to us.

I appreciate all your comments so please keep them coming,
Karen

Maybe it helps that there are also direct TGV trains (±3 hours) between Paris and St-Malo, the train station is not so far from the walled part of the city, so no worry about traffic and difficult parking (along the road signposted as intra-murros if you arrive with a car). So having a bit more time to spend in that area.

Last June, we spent 3 weeks traveling from Nance through Brittany and Normandy and ending in Paris. We had planned 2 days for the D-Day area and ended up cancelling a night in Honfleur so we could stay longer and see more. Day tripping to Mont St. Michel is a zoo--spending the night there allows you to experience the mont in peace. Rick Steve's coastal route is beautiful and if you like oysters then a stop at Cancale to eat them sitting on the seawall is memorable. Returning a car in Paris took the best part of an afternoon. You could be trying to do too much in a short time, remembering that things always take twice as long as you plan.