Train travel

Kathy, not bad. A bit tight for all of the places you wish to see but it's nicely planned. One quick thought before my comments. France no longer participates in the Eurail 2, 3 or 5-day Eurail pass. Secondly, England doesn't participate at all. In Italy, you will pay a 10Euro supplemental fee for each high-speed train that you will be on. On a point-to-point ticket, you will be on a couple of low-cost Regionale trains (to and from Assisi). For the Rome to CT portion, Trenitalia just loves to send you via the more expensive very high-speed train to Florence first. Actually, you can take a lower-cost InterCity train from Rome to the CT on a run that goes out to the west to Civitavecchia (cruise port) and then up the west coast to the CT. Finally, your train trip from the CT to Beaune will take about 12.0hrs with 4-5 train changes along the way. If you have a hotel booked for that night, it may be in jeopardy. Also, don't try to book from the CT to Beaune. Beaune is not that large and you will be routed to either Lyon-Part Dieu or Dijon Ville. One alternate suggestion is to take the Thello night train from Milano-Centrale to Dijon. That means that you take the afternoon Trenitalia train from the CT to Milano-Centrale. The Thello departs at 23:38 and arrives at 06:35. About 7.0hrs. At Dijon, I would highly recommend renting a car right in the Dijon train station. There are 2-3 rental counters all together in the train station. We've turned in rental cars there. You are then prepared to begin your touring of Burgundy right from there. Beaune is about 30-40 minutes from Dijon.

(More from Larry) For your journey in to Paris, I again recommend turning in your rental car at the Dijon train station and take the 160MPH-180-MPH train into Paris. If you book from Beaune, they will just route you to Dijon anyway. Besides, you can purchase and print out at home your TGV ticket from Dijon to Paris. The ticket from Beaune to Dijon will most likely be a Regional train ticket that you can buy online but you can't print out at home. You'll have to pick it up at any staffed train station. (SNCF doesn't seem to let you print Regional train tickets at home).

BTW, we are planning 2-3 days at each location and allowing one day for traveling between locations. We may also want to take excursions such as from Assisi to other small hilltowns to a day. How does that come into play?

Kathy, can you be a little more specific on how much time you will have? You may want to consider an open-jaw flight; for example if you start in London, fly into London and depart out of Rome, or vice-versa.

The Eurail pass is a ticket and not a train. Most locations of any size are served by trains BUT not always by direct trains. Often will require one or two train changes. Have been on some routes where we made as many as four or five train changes. You will always have direct trains between major cities like Paris/London, Rome/Milan, Rome/Florence but as you go to smaller areas you will need changes. We can help but you need to learn to do it yourself. Just like scheduling flights in the US. Use the trains sites - they will give the options - show the number of changes, and length of time. You choice the one that best fits your schedule. One of the easier sites to use is bahn.de It will show all train schedules for Europe. However, you can only purchase tickets on that site that begin or end in Germany. Advance reservations are not as critical as US airlines. Trains rarely sell out. You can save money with early purchased but those tickets come with limitations and sometimes very strict limitations. So you have to be absolutely certain of your schedule if you buy advance tickets. Except for England, trains tend to be fairly cheap so we don't do much advance purchases other than a day or two before we leave for the next town. From your limited information I doubt if a rail pass will save you any money.

Here is our detailed itinerary - Starting On June 9, 2013 Day 1 - Fly from Wash. DC to Venice Day 2 - Venice Day 3 - Venice Day 4 - Train from Venice to Assisi Day 5 - Assisi Day 6 - Train from Assisi to Rome Day 7 - Rome Day 8 - Rome Day 9 - Train from Rome to CT Day 10 - CT Day 11 - CT Day 12 - Train from CT to Beaune Day 13 - Beaune - rent a car and explore French countryside Day 14 - Beaune - explore French countryside Day 15 - Train from Beaune to Paris Day 16 - Paris Day 17 - Paris Day 18 - Train from Paris to London Day 19 - London Day 20 - London Day 21 - Fly home from London Does that help? We already have our plane reservations and Hotels.
What I am doing now is working on the trains. Very confusing websites and some don't have schedules for June yet.

Thanks Larry, That is exactly what I needed. I am going to adjust the itinerary to use Dijon as our base for Burgundy instead of Beaune. So now that I no longer have to get the Eurail Pass, do I still need to make reservation ahead of time. If so, how soon? Some people have said you don't have to make reservations at all and others have said you can do it just a couple days ahead. What do you think?

Kathy, the big reason for advance reservations is to take advantage of the nice discounts on the tickets. For the French TGV, you can begin shopping for tickets 90 days out from your time of travel. For the Dijon/Paris run, the base fare is 62Euro. I see advance fares of 49Euros. In trade, your tickets are generally non-refundable and sometimes non-exchangable. If this "lock-in" to a specific travel date and time is not acceptable, you can easily get your tickets when you are in Italy. You will simply pay full fare as the discounted fares will be gone. We always go for the discounted tickets and we've never missed a train. For the website, go to www.tgv-europe.com In the bottom of the gray area in the upper right of the page that appears, Great Britain or France as your Ticket Collection country. Just don't USA or the system will switch you to RailEurope which is a ticket broker. Don't worry about having to go the England to pick up your tickets. As soon as you purchase online, you will receive an email and you can print out your tickets. We've done this journey as well. For the car return, drive into the train station and approach the parking garage. As you approach, do not go up the ramp into the parking garage. Instead, take the lane to the right. You'll see a small sign that says rental car return. For your stay in Beaune, you can still do that. It's not far away.