travel by train or bus in France

To get to the French railway site: http://www.tgv-europe.com/en/train-ticket (when it asks you to "choose your country", choose "Great Britain"...this keeps you from being sent to the "RailEurope" site; you can still buy e-tickets or print-at-home tickets) FYI - know that sometimes you'll need to use "Sarlat-la-Caneda"; there's more than one 'Sarlat' but I assume you mean THE medieval town...and "Avignon Centre" for, well, Avignon... Well, it's gonna be a looong day. I bet you already knew that. In fact, I can't find a French rail site to give me a route because they don't like the fact that more that 3 connections are required...Hmmm. (cont.)

(cont.) OK - so, go look at the German rail site - it's great for looking at travel schedules for other countries in addition to Germany: http://www.bahn.com/i/view/USA/en/index.shtml The shortest trip I found (with a made-up date) is 9 hours with 2 connections; 2 trains and a bus. Then the other trains get ugly, quick. IF there's any advance purchase benefit available on any leg of this route, you'll have to find it by breaking the trip into 3 parts; use the schedules from the bahn.com site to find where to break the trip into 'legs'. Et voila - if you go back to tgv-europe.com and use 'Avignon - Norbonne', you can purchase THOSE tickets online. Not a HUGE savings - €5,20 off is the best I can find. Then, I got trains for 'Narbonne - Souillac'; here, you can save more money. Then it's a bus b/n Souillac and Sarlat; I have no info on that. Perhaps someone who does can save you from me LOL! You can (and probably should!) do this in 2 legs - 'Avignon - Souillac' and then the bus from there to Sarlat. I don't know if the € come out any different one way or the other...I'm not going back to add up the various prices. BTW, these prices are 2nd class. I hope this didn't confuse you any more! Please let me know if this is a mess ;-)

Long distance region-to-region transport in France is, sadly, really really bad if the straight line between your destinations doesn't pass through Paris. (About the only exception being the Alsace-Lorraine->South axis, which has express trains and a TGV line under construction.) This is one case where you may have to give up your hopes of eco-friendly public transport and hire a car.