TOLL ROADS IN FRANCE

I can picture one toll plaza on the E46 between Caen and Honfleur, but I could well be wrong.

There will be tolls from Honfleur to Rouen (about three booths), unless you avoid the freeway and take the much longer route.

Wild guess is about fifteen euros (certainly not twenty) for the whole trip.

All toll plazas have manned booths as well as toss-the-coins affairs. I've never tried to use a credit card. Some lanes have what looks like a credit card symbol, but I've always thought those were for passes of some kind.

Thanks!

We drove from Amsterdam to Barcelona last summer and spent well over 100 Euros in tolls through France. Unfortunately, I can't tell you about credit cards - we used cash.

We didn't go east of Caen (actually were on coast from Ouistreham), but were all over D-Day area over to Mont St. Michel, and encountered no tolls in that direction.

Used my American Master Card a few years ago. It's not "chipped" and worked fine.

We had a good road map (probably Michelin ... sorry, it's not here with us) and it clearly showed which roads were toll. (I was the "navigator" -- my job to keep us off, or direct us onto, the toll roads.) Some times we opted for the toll roads -- savings in time/gas; other times we took the scenic/free side roads.

As I recall, we got a 'ticket' at the start (or when we entered the toll road) and only paid at the end (or at the exit). IOW, we were not "chucking change" at periodic toll booths along the way.

Also, there are stops (inside the toll boundary) for food/gas -- "aire" in French -- so you don't need to exit for that. In fact, we developed favorites for food stops and would hunt for the stop (l'aire) that had a food place we liked. A perq for the navigator was a lunch-sized bottle of wine. Not bad for a fast-food joint ... oh, yeah, I forgot ... this is France! LOL

Your questions are not at all silly. One of the stressful parts of traveling is not knowing how very mundane things work in other countries. There is a website, www.viamichelin.com, that works like mapquest. Put in your starting and ending points. You'll get a route, a time estimate (add some, they're overly optimistic), the cost of tolls, a fuel cost estimate, and the lowdown on where cameras are located to catch speeders. I think you can even indicate toll roads vs avoid toll roads. Then you can decide how to proceed. Be careful to get in the appropriate lane when exiting. Some are limited to drivers with electronic passes, and some are not manned. The icons are pretty clear. We found that usually, but not always, our cc's worked at the manned booths. Keep some cash ready as a backup.

Thank you, Rosalyn, for that website! I'll check it out.

Be sure to watch for the signs indicating which lanes are for passes and which for cash. Several years ago, we were returning to Paris from Normandy. I was busy counting out the fee, but my husband mistakenly got in the passes lane. We were trying to figure out what to do as we could see cars stacking up behind us when a young man came up, inserted his pass card and told us to go. A few kilometers later when we puilled in to an aire to top off the tank, the same guy pulled in next to us. We tried to pay him, but he refused, and thanked us for saving his country-------he had seen the small American flag decal my husband had put on our bumper.