Cruising from Barcelona-Nd help planning week before

Normandy is a bit out of the way. Actually, a lot of out the way. If you really want to start in Paris, I'd heavily suggest a different route. You can easily take the A6 and stop in Beaune for a couple hours and then continue on. You can drive via Toulouse, or take a different route and go over the Millau Viaduct (world's tallest auto bridge.) It will take a long time to drive to Barcelona. We started 1.5 hours south of Paris and it still took us 10 hours to get to within 45 minutes of Barcelona. IT's a pretty drive, but gets tedious. I have no idea what the timing is via train. Honestly, I'd suggest flying from Paris. If you get tix far enough in advance, it's not that expensive on Easy Jet.

It's possible. A week is enough time to meander from Paris to Barcelona. Just remember time is like money, you can only spend it once. You won't be able to fully enjoy Paris and still have time for a liesurely paced tour toward Barcelona. I probably wouldn't drive for what you are thinking. Picking up in one country and dropping off in another always bumps the cost up a lot. You could possibly pick a car up in Paris then drop in Toulouse, Montpellior or Nimes and train the rest of the way. Another option is to fly into Madrid and spend your week (by car when you leave Madrid) seeing some of the top northern Spanish or southern Spanish sites (not time IMO to try both). Northern Spain would be convenient. If you go south, take the AVE train from Madrid to the city of your choice, then wander in a rental car, and AVE train back to Barcelona.

Thank you. In reading my post and looking at a better map I see the distance and agree that driving is out of the question and we will be getting flights from Paris to Barcelona.
Since our tickets are fixed into Paris, our plan now is to drive from CDG and tour the Normandy area for a few days then return the car at CDG and fly to Barcelona. Question: on intercontinent flights like Paris to Barcelona and Barcelona to Madrid, is Ryan Air truly the cheap option? Should we wait to book these types of tickets?

On another post, some people do not like Ryan air at all. We used Easyjet, just be aware that these discount lines are very strict about luggage weight. Can you get the train from Barcelona to Madrid? It might be cheaper and less time than having to get to airport in Barcelona 2 hours early.

Between Barcelona and Madrid, I would take the fast AVE train rather than dealing with flying. The trip is under 3 hours, city center to city center, and if you can get Web fare tickets (buy online 62 days in advance) the fare is only 47 euros. The trains are amazing.

While RyanAir can be very cheap, there are two downsides: luggage fees and getting to/from the Beauvais airport. Easy Jet will fly from Orly (and occassionally CDG). I don't know anyone who loves either airport, but people around here tend to prefer Easy Jet (but I think that's mostly because of how far Beauvais is.)

Thank you so much for the advice. We will look into dropping our car at one of the airports that support Easyjet or Ryan Air.

We took a cruise from Barcelona just this April and what we did was fly into Paris, spend a week there and then instead of flying took the train to Barcelona. They have the hi speed trains now that go from Paris into Spain and then you take a local train into Barcelona. We left Paris at around 7:30am and got into Barcelona at 2:30pm. Nice ride and more relaxing then having to get to the airport, go through security, check luggage (most of your normal carryon stuff does not fit into the regional air carriers bins so you have to check almost everything) It was just more relaxing for us and the price was much more resonable than I thought. It was a nice relaxing day for us inbetween Paris and our cruise.

Thank you! Since we are 4 travelling, I'd been told to expect the train to actually be more. I am going to look at this now. Where did you stay? Was it a convenient transfer from train to hotel, hotel to cruise docks?