Train or Car in Spain

Renting a car in one country and dropping it off in another country almost always comes with a shockingly large fee. You're probably not going to want to do that.

Spain has wonderful public transportation (trains and buses). Unless you want to explore the countryside, I would recommend using public transportation.

I’d do something like this ...

Bus to San Sebastián (3)
Bus to Bilbao (2)
<< pick up car >>
Via Vitoria-Gasteiz to Laguardia-Rioja (2)
To Burgos (1)
Via Valladolid to Salamanca (2)
<< drop off car >>
Train to Madrid (4) - with day to Toledo
Fly to Corsica

Mallorca would be a far easier choice than Corsica with regards to logistics.

We plan to fly to Nice and visit Corsica for few days before flying home. Is it better to go to Mallorca?
Any tips on driving in Spain.

What defines "better". They're two similiar islands with Mallorca being better served by public transport and more varied areas (Magaluf is a far cry from Valdemossa). Corsica in general is more expensive. Both have a great food culture. Mallorca is easier to get to although if you're in Nice then Corsica can be easily reached by ferry. Most of the budget airlines fly to Mallorca.

Spain is easy enough to drive in. The major roads are all well maintained however the same cannot be said for many of the smaller towns and villages. Roads can be very narrow in these and a big vehicle is not recommended. Speed limits are well enforced even if it doesn't appear so when observing the locals driving. The driving in Mallorca is even better than on the mainland, it's less frenetic and, outside of Palma, reasonably quiet.

Unless you feel you must include Madrid (art!) and Toledo (architecture and history) on this trip, I think June is a good time to concentrate on northern Spain: Basque Country, Picos de Europa (dramatic scenery), then either out to Santiago de Compostela (church) in Galicia, visiting Burgos and Leon (both with magnificent churches) on the way, or eastward through the Pyrenees (more dramatic scenery) to Barcelona/Catalunya. The disadvantage of pointing toward Galicia is that I doubt that there are non-stop flights from the smaller cities out there to Nice. I believe there are active-sport opportunities in the Picos de Europa; the lovely old stone town of Potes seemed to be the center of tourist activity.

Either of those trips would be best by car once you left Bilbao/San Sebastian, though one could travel to Galicia by train and bus (I did it in 2016), skipping the Picos de Europa. If you travel east, you wouldn't want to be burdened with a car in Barcelona. In general, I'd say that with four people in this area, a car is preferable, but you can certainly visit a lot of great places without one.

You could also concentrate your time in Catalunya; there's plenty there for more than two weeks, especially if you have a car for some time in the Pyrenees. You could even pop across the border from Puigcerda (town with a very pretty hill-top historic district in the Cerdanya valley) to take the narrow-gauge Yellow Train to the fortified town of Villefranche-de-Conflent. It's an SNCF train, so the cost is not exorbitant, unlike many other trains of special tourist interest.

Oh thank you so much for the wonderful pointers. We are considering simplifying our transportation and just rent car from Bordeaux and returning it in Nice, after visiting Corsica. That way, we're still returning car in same country, less expensive. We'd figure this might be a lot of driving, but we love road trips anyway, and will save time from flying and getting in/out of airports. If it's too hectic to drive in the larger cities, we'll use alternate mode of transport. Does that sound OK?

Considering that it'll be very hot in Southern Spain, we will take the advice and focus on Northern part of Spain, from West to East.

* What are the best towns to stay in as base for each area if we're spending 2 weeks in Spain?
* From Spain, we will drive along the coast to get to Nice. Is there anything on that stretch worth spending time on?

Cheers,
L

That’s quite a hike. It’s not clear what time frame you have for the entire route.

•Bordeaux
•Spanish Basque Country - San Sebastián, Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz, LaGuardia
•Navarra - Estella, Puente la Reina, Olite, Ujué
•Zaragoza
•Barcelona
•Girona & Costa Brava
•Provence - Nimes, Avignon, Arles, Marseille
•Nice

That’s quite a hike. It’s not clear what time frame you have for the entire route.

If you want to choose between Bilbao and San Sebastian as a base for the coastal Basque Country (and I probably would, rather than changing hotels), I'd say folks interested in nightlife might prefer SS. Though I'm sure Bilbao is lively, too, the historic area of SS seemed to be wall-to-wall bars and tapas joints. I preferred Bilbao, which seemed to have more to see, but many folks would vote for SS.

Girona is handy not just for itself (it's a full-day city, to me, with a good museum and two historic churches) but also as a base for visiting Figueres (Dali Theatre and Museum), Cadaques and other coastal towns.

In other areas, it really depends on what specific places you want to see, so I suggest picking up comprehensive guide books with good coverage of northern Spain and southern France.

There are a lot of interesting places that are more or less on the way from the border north of Barcelona to Nice: Collioure, Perpignan (larger), Narbonne (larger), Pezenas, Ceret, Sete, Montpellier (university city, much larger)--and that's just places I've visited in the area before you reach Arles.

Since you mentioned art, there are museums in many of those places, actually, probably all of them. In southern France, it's pretty unusual to encounter a tourist destination without an art museum of some sort.

We have done it both ways. Our most recent trip we flew from Paris to Seville, spent a week there in an apartment and did a sidetrip to Cordoba by train; we took a bus to Ronda and stayed there two nights and then took a train to Granada and stayed two nights then took a train to Madrid for another week and did day trips by train. It was quite easy to do this without a car. So it depends on just what you want to do. All the places we visited had good transport links. We didn't however get to some caves we wanted to see near Granada because we didn't have transportation. You can do a lot however without a car

Here are some of the places we went:
https://janettravels.wordpress.com/category/spain/

When we visited Barcelona 15 years ago we rented a car for day tripping to the small city where the Dali Museum is and then out to the coast to a small fishing village. For a day trip to Montserrant we took public transport.