Car rental logistics France, best place to return

Definitely arrange your car rental ahead of time; it's much cheaper if you do it that way. Dinan (Brittany) to Loire to Dordogne, then back to Paris in 8 days is a lot of driving. Have you looked at viamichelin or google maps to see the distances and travel times? I love the Dordogne, but would not include it with those other locations, due to the distances involved and the huge number of great places to see in each location (especially the Dordogne). If you do go to the Dordogne, either to or from Paris, it's faster to take the train between Paris and Brive, and pickup/drop off a rental car there. That being said, as Giverny is northwest of Paris, I would probably arrange for a rental pickup somewhere on the northwest side of Paris. Or perhaps a pickup from the Gare du Nord rail station. You could also pick up from CDG, but as that's northeast of Paris, it would be a pain to get from there over to Giverny and thence on to Dinan. Personally, I would always stay IN Paris on my last night of a vacation, rather than near the airport. You could drop off your rental car on the outskirts of Paris, take a taxi downtown, have a wonderful last evening in Paris, and take public transportation or a cab to the airport early the next morning. You can always make up for lost sleep by napping on the long plane ride home.

Def. arrange your car rental from US, you will save alot of $ by doing this. There are lots of Paris car rental locations w/ easy access to motorways but you need to do alittle research w/ a map perhaps there is one nr your hotel. Return your car at CDG and stay at Hotel Ibis or Etap Hotel at CDG. They have free shuttles that take you to terminals.

Good grief. Keep it simple rather than chasing all over the place. Get the car at the airport and head south on the A1. Around St Denis pick up the A86 and use it until the A14 and you're off and running. Two turns until you get off the freeway, that's it, and it's well-signed the whole way. Total time to Giverny is an hour, maybe less since you'll fly once you get northwest of Paris on the A14. You'd be hard pressed to get into the city and find a car place in that amount of time. Once you're back on the freeway leaving Giverny, Dinan is about three hours away. It's freeway all but the last couple of miles. You'll be pushing eight the whole way just to keep up with the flow. You'll have to slow down for three or four toll booths. Have euros, it's going to stiff you twenty-five or thirty bucks. You might want to rethink this a bit since I'd guess you'd be hitting Dinan minimally eight hours after you get off the plane - - sometimes you tend to get a bit groggy that first day, espcially on freeways. Rouen would make a good alternate stop that first night.

At the end, take the car back to the airport and stay there. I use the ETAP because it's cheap and has shuttles. If you have a 1030 departure, you have to be at the counter by 0730. You have to get upstairs and find the counter so you need to get off of the RER at 0700. Depending on where you stay in town, and assuming you have to make a metro/rer change somewhere, and assuming you don't know the layout of either Paris Nord or the place you might need to make another change, you've got almost an hour and a half shot from the second you hit the first metro station until you get off at Roissy. That means you've got to get on the metro at 0530 and catch the very first train when they start running. What time do you want to get up, exactly? The rest of the driving ain't that bad. The worst day will be coming back to Paris from the Dordogne - - that'll be a good six or eight hours since you'll have to stop for grub.

Driving in and out of CDG with a rental car is a piece of cake. Don't sweat it. Bring your GPS from home and have a small Michelin fold-out map of France with you. Check out and book rental cars here using the web sites of AutoEurope or Gemut. Both are brokers that represent all of the majors. We have used AE for most of our EU auto rentals. They have a great web site. If you have any questions you can call them in Maine, and they will gladly help.