London, Paris, Amsterdam April 2024

Buy Rick Steves Pocket London guide book (5th edition): https://store.ricksteves.com/shop/p/pocket-london to help decide what you want to see and do while there. I highly suggest a minimum of four nights in London with arrival day being a day of settling in instead of sight-seeing.
From London, take the Eurostar to Paris (2h 30m). After you buy your plane tickets book your Eurostar tickets. The further out you buy the cheaper they will be: https://www.eurostar.com/us-en. Some of the earlier trains are less expensive than the late morning trains. This is also a good time to book your hotels. Hotels also tend to be cheaper the further out you book.
Buy Rick Steves France guide book (20th edition): https://store.ricksteves.com/shop/p/france-guidebook to decide how many nights to sleep there. Take a direct train from Paris’s Austerlitz station to Blois-Chambord and sleep in Blois to explore the Loire Valley: https://www.sncf-connect.com/en-en/. This is also a good place to rent a car that you will need to return in Normandy before taking a direct train to Paris to get to Bruges. A good base to sleep in Normandy is Bayeux.
To get from Normandy to Bruges will take a full day by train requiring multiple connections. Don’t plan on renting a car in France and returning it in Belgium because the cost will be exorbitant. You only need two nights in Bruges before taking a train to Amsterdam that will involve a connection. I also recommend buying Rick’s Pocket Amsterdam guide book: https://store.ricksteves.com/shop/p/pocket-amsterdam.

Renting a car cross border is expensive, but renting it one way is often possible. You could for example return the car in Lille, in stead of Normandy, and just take trains to Brugge from there. Trains go from Lille to Brugge (with a change in Kortrijk) once an hour, and these are local commuter trains, that you can just buy tickets for on the spot.

It comes to this: how many actual nights will you have? Consider your arrival day and very likely the next day as a wash-jet lag. Departure day goes into this section too. You may only have a full 18-19 days to work with which means you might be trying to cover too much ground.

Putting it on an actual paper calendar can help immensely. Then you can see if you’ve given yourself enough travel time and days where you want to stay to see if you may want to revise your stops. It sounds a bit archaic, but I go through at least 4 calendar printouts when planning our trips which are usually 6-8 weeks. Gives me space to plug in sights we want to include, how long it takes to travel between stops, restaurant open times and just about any information I can think of. Then, we go through it all and change nights of stay according to criteria we’ve included. Others will use a spreadsheet. Unfortunately the days of just showing up, getting a room and being free as the wind for travel have dissipated.

It will be a great adventure! Happy trails.

The drive from Bayeux (Normandy) to Lille takes 5h. The train from Lille to Bruges goes back to Paris before going to Bruges and involves two connections. I say ditch the car near Bayeux and take a direct train to Paris and a train to Bruges that involves another transfer probably in Brussels.

“ The train from Lille to Bruges goes back to Paris before going to Bruges and involves two connections.”

This is not correct. There are direct highspeed TGV trains from Lille to Brussels that don’t go via Paris, but go directly from train station Lille Europe to Brussels Midi/South. At Brussels-Midi/South you then transfer to a local train to Bruges. Total travel time from Lille to Bruges is 1 hour 40 minutes. See the website of the Belgian national railway company for schedules, fares and tickets; https://www.b-europe.com/EN

With regards to the Amsterdam part of your trip. You should be aware that the last 2 weeks of April are absolute peak peak peak season for Amsterdam and surroundings because of the tulips. Also our national holiday Kingsday is on April 27. There is no reason to avoid Amsterdam because of these things. The tulip fields and the Keukenhof are well worth a visit and Kingsday is a fun holiday to experience, but hotel prices in Amsterdam reflect the peak season. You should make a refundable hotel booking asap.

Thank you for sharing the link, Dutch Traveler! I just bookmarked it.

This is a bit of a marathon, but 3 weeks is enough time. To me, it's two or three two-week vacations put together. Theses areas are heavily discussed here, and you can immediately get a vast amount of info, more than you can get in this single discussion, from the Search box top left. Try some keywords like "normandy beaches", "bruges to amsterdam", "normandy lille bruges", and similar. Example:

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/normandy-brittany-thoughts

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/belgium/day-trips-from-brussels-768c7c85-75b9-4374-ad13-ae36967bc521

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/france/travel-to-mount-st-michel

If you haven't traveled to multiple destinations in Europe previously, you need to be aware that each time you change locations, you will use 1/2-1 day of your time. 6 destinations in 3 weeks will take the better part of 6 days, and that only leaves 13 days to actually spend in those places. I see that you went to Italy this year. I don't know your itinerary, but my experience is that train travel in Italy is significantly more efficient, time-wise, than travel by car and the distances between places like Rome to Florence and Florence to Venice are relatively small. Do not assume you can cover territory in as little time as tours do. Tour companies have years of experience arranging logistics to maximize your sightseeing time. Hopefully others on the forum can talk about possible day trips from Paris to Normandy and the Loire by more efficient group tours that would save the time you would otherwise spend checking in and out of hotels.

Remember that you need to get tickets to the Anne Frank House far in advance. I love your plan to go in April, rather than in the summer, but people on this forum have said that major European cities were crowded even in April this year.

Also, when you go to Bayeux, don't miss seeing the amazing 900 year old Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

Yes, Bruges is better than Brussels.

For Amsterdam, I recommend staying near the city center. We found an affordable small hotel near the Anne Frank House called the Hotel Nadia. A more expensive place is Canal House.

Wow! Some great information! Thanks to all who responded. Does anyone know if spring break weeks before and after Easter are generally crowded times in England & France? Easter is March 31 next year. We are now thinking to possibly get started a week earlier.

Considered Ghent instead of Bruges.

There are some threads about why Ghent might be a better choice, particularly if you are using your Belgian city as a base for visiting other places in Belgium.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/belgium/ghent-or-brugge-to-base-for-5-6-days

I've stayed in Ghent twice, Bruges four or five times. Both are safe (to the extent that small cities in Europe are safe ) and manageable places. Prefer Ghent - 80% as many pretty buildings and much less of a Disney-fied tourist town. But Bruges certainly has its charms - nothing quite like a walk around that town in the very early morning as the sun rises. It may as well be 1423.

Getting back to the OPs original question about car rentals- yes, renting a car for the Normandy and Loire segments makes perfect sense. You could pick up the car in either Caen (for Normandy, base in Bayeux) and drop off in St Pierre des Corps (for the Loire, base in Amboise) or the reverse, before taking the train to Paris for your next segment. Just know that the travel day from London to either Normandy or the Loire base will be a relatively long one.