Brive to Interlaken?

It doesn't look easy, 11 or 12 hours because they have you return to Paris. Apparently there are not east-west routes in that area. Could you possibly return the car someplace with better train connections, like Lyon?

I would say, arrange to drop the car off in Toulouse or Bordeaux and fly to Zurich. The train from the airport there to Interlaken is about 2 hours.

'Brice has an airport, so if flying is under consideration, fly from there.' To where? Paris? London? Charter flight to Interlaken, maybe?

I think Ed's point is that Brive's is a small airport and it may be difficult to get to Zurich from there short of a charter flight (pricy). Going by land from SW France, rural and poorly served by rail, to the Berner Oberland, rural and in mountains, is a lengthy project. Air is the best prospect for annihilating logistical obstacles, although it's going to take pretty much all day, depending on where Pam starts the day. (No need to do so from Brive, necessarily.) It might be expensive and tricky even from the international airports in Toulouse and Bordeaux, though. Pam could also look at flights to Basel, if there's a significant savings. A bus adds about a half hour to Interlaken over Zurich, from the airport in Basel.

Thanks everyone for the input...it is just as I had thought much too complicated sort of "you can't get there from here". So we have changed our itinerary and ditched Switzerland. Intend to drop off car in Brive, return to Paris for a night, then take the train to Strasburg and spend some time in southern Germany before flying out of Munich 4 or 5 days later. (any favorite small towns/villages in the Frieburg and surrounds that you would recommend? :-) )
Thanks again!

Ed's point was that the closest you can get to Interlaken from Brive–Souillac is Paris/Beauvais since the only scheduled carrier is Ryan. We'd already been down the Paris road in the train discussion. Beauvais is way the hell and gone. It's the extraneous posts that get people starting to chase their tails. Somewhere in the guidelines it says don't post unless you know about it personally and especially don't post from looking up crap on the internet. Everybody raise their hands whose either taken off or landed at Brive. ......hmmmm ....just me? Shucks.

I was actually being facetious with my "fly from there" comment, because driving to Toulouse to fly (to where?) wouldn't save any time either. But apparently it didn't come across that way so I deleted it. FWIW, flying from Brive to Paris might save time over the 4-hour train trip to Paris, which is how one starts a train journey from Brive to Interlaken. But they've changed their plans so it doesn't matter any more. Also, if one cannot look things up on the internet, how the heck to we get so many posts about train schedules, etc? How many people have posted routes and schedules for places they haven't been? More than a few, I think.

Colmar is a gorgeous looking German town in the Alsace of Eastern France and Furtwangen has a wonderful cuckoo clock museum and are all near Freiburg.