Where to spend 1 night between Turin & Lyon

After checking the town out on the net, it looks perfect. If you have any dining/accommodation suggestions, please pm me.

And yes...Sarlat plan is Thursday and Friday nights to be there for the Saturday market.

You wouldn't catch me stopping in Lyon on that trip. Chambery either for that matter. Lyon and Marseille are the second largest cities in France (probably Lyon by population and Marseille by area). Dropping by and worming your way in and out) for a casual night's stop is only going to add time to an already long trip. Chambery is just the opposite. It doesn't offer much and you'll get there so soon that you'll be twiddling your thumbs and tapping your toe eating for supper to roll around. Back up and think about the whole trip. From Florence(?) to Sarlat you've got a good twelve hours in the saddle with a couple of very brief stops (gas, etc, but not lunch). Now go back and bust it into two days. On Day One you're initially heading west to northwest. If you dilly dally on getting started, the sun's going to start getting in your eyes as the day goes on. You want to get the southward turn done as quickly as you can - - start early. Push on. There's not much to stop for, but a lot to enjoy out the window. Maybe go as far as Saint Etienne. You will have burned six or seven hours, but you've got the worst behind you. Day Two will be a piece of cake. You can fit in Peche Merl, Rocamadour, Souillac, actually a couple of things in the eastern Dordogne area and still be in Sarlat by mid-afternoon. What you don't want to do is make the final swing westward after dark. It comes on fast down in the valley and some of those little twisty roads have neither centerline nor side markings.

About the market. It's really nothing special unless you've never seen one. You could drive up to Perigueux and probably many of the same vendors a couple of days before. Go somewhere else and you'd see some of the others on Friday. Hence the term traveling vendors/markets. If any of the Rickites ever googled 'market days france', the economy of Sarlat would go further south than Greece's. there's hundreds of them. If you develop a better idea for saturday, have at it. Just make sure when you got to bed friday that the car's well clear of where the market's being set up. You dont want to have it chocked, hauled, and chunked in the river. One little secret: Not to bust your bubble, but there is no mystical 'Paella Man'. Probably half of the markets in the southern part of the country have dudes with paella skillets. And really good paella only comes from Valencia, anyway.

Ed - thanks for the counterpoints. I understand your market comments having spent a week in Provence some years back. We didn't intentionally desire to hit several town's market days, but it ended up that way - and you do end up seeing much of the same thing from town to town (and probably the same vendors). We went through the same thing living in Germany with all of the Christmas markets - what a blast at first but after hitting a few..."hmmm...it's everything we saw at the last three." Regardless, we still enjoy the food and browsing. I'll do some more research on some of your recommendations.

Saint Etienne sounds intriguing - wine town, right? Nobody brought this up, but any thoughts on Grenoble? How does that rank for consideration?