Normandy: No reservations!

Note sure about the timing but what I hate is wasting my valuable vacation time trying to deal with finding accomodation on the fly so I never travel without reservations. If I know where I am staying I can also research what I want to see and restaurants etc. But I am a bit of a control freak

Did you mean Loire Valley?

jamikins: I guess it's the Loire Valley, my DH is actually working on this part, but I really need to get opinions on the footloose and fancy free part. Thanks for your input, it adds to what we have to think about. Or should I say, what he has to think about. I'm already thinking the way you do

It can be done. We did it in Normandy in the same season, using http://en.gites-de-france.com/vacation-rentals-bed-breakfasts,b-and-b-r1-liste.html?critinit=O . I would make a list of 4 or 5 places that would be in the area where I thought I would be that night and start calling in the early afternoon to find a room. We had to go to a hotel on a Saturday night when we were in the Morbihan area, but otherwise we had no problems. However, I speak French. The old listing used to list the languages that the hosts could handle, but language skills are not obvious in the upgraded web site.

You could also stop in at any Logis de France along your route and pick up one of their books listing all of their affiliate w/map.

As they also have excellent restaurants, we would just start looking on their map for the nearest one towards lunchtime. Sometimes we just got a room where we stopped for lunch. Some years we've had a phone to call for reservation and some years we just "winged it". Worked both ways for us, as long as you don't wait until 5 or 6 pm to start looking!

oops - meant to include their site

http://www.logishotels.com/

I like your husband’s attitude, tempered with your attitude. Since you are more concerned than he is, maybe you should become the lodgings specialist. Will you be bringing a phone or netbook/whatever on the trip? They help with research.

We are B&B people, not hotel people, so maybe some of our advice won’t be relevant to you.

Definitely don’t try winging it on Friday or Saturday nights. Lodgings book up ahead of time in the popular areas.

If you are hotel people, maybe you can wing it. But I still wouldn't pull into town around 6 and count on getting a room. Probably 3:00 would be the latest to start making your phone calls.

Ideally around mid-afternoon you arrive in a town and decide this is where you’d like to spend the night. If you don’t speak much French, you can ask the tourist office to make reservations for you locally. Walk in, ask for their list, look through it, and give them your top three choices. (Not every town has a tourist office open when you want it.)

We wing it now and then with B&Bs, but doing that every night would be too hair-raising. One time we made phone calls starting at 4:30 and got turned down at 3 or 4 places till we found a remote B&B an hour away that had just had a cancellation (an international agricultural show in Laval had filled all the hotels and B&Bs). Another time we pulled into a tourist office in the Loire Valley late in the day. The patient woman behind the desk called around for us and got turned down 6 or 7 times. Apparently we got the last room in the area, and this was in the middle of the week.

Often we semi-wing it, doing our research the night before we’re ready to move on. We use an older Gites de France regional B&B guidebook as well as a netbook so we can consult the Gites-de-France website for more up-to-date information on particular places. We make our choice, based partly on whether they offer wifi, send off an email, and usually we’ll get a yes/no pretty quickly. We email back to confirm or move to the next choice. We follow up with a phone call if we have to.

We always reserve for just one night, but often we love the B&B or the location and extend our stay there. Staying in B&Bs is one of our favorite parts of road trips in France.

Besides gites-de-France, http://www.gites-de-france.com, we also like the Alastair Sawday website, www.sawdays.co.uk, for hotels or B&Bs with a little extra charm.

You all have given us SO MANY good ideas and valuable information. We worked on the schedule tonight, and will figure out the details and I'll post our planned itinerary.

We're starting out in Paris, and will also be looking to rent an apartment for 8 nights. If you have any suggestions or recommendations.

Our total time in France will be 3 weeks, including the 8 nights in Paris, and about 4 on the S coast.

I'll post once we have a clear itinerary. Hopefully in the next few days.

Thanks again! (Yes, we'll have a laptop, we'll get those books, and we'll select some B&B's prior)

May is an extremely popular time in Normandy. When we did a road trip several years ago, we made all of our reservations a month in advance and often our first 2 or 3 choices were already fully booked. I like the ability to spend our time seeing the countryside rather than going from hotel to hotel looking for lodging. You often end up staying in places you otherwise wouldn't and paying more to do so.

If your husband insists on "footloose and fancy free", go armed with a list of hotels that you can call from the car. That way, you won't waste so much of your precious vacation time searching for hotels.

Prepare your husband to pay the costs of his whimsy. While it may be possible to waltz into last-minute bookings at reasonable prices, it's a better bet you will end up with little or no choice of accommodation and be forced into high-cost situations. And it is certainly time right now to rent an apartment for May in Paris or you will be stuck with leftovers -- not quite so romantic an idea, is it?

Thank you all for your input. Here is our itinerary so far. Please comment. Any mistakes? Anything to cut out? Add?
Any opinions which ones we should definitely have pre-booked, and which ones have many options?
We are driving from the middle of German, stopping once on the way.

1 - Reims (sleep) see cathedral.

2-10 -drive to Paris for 9 nts (not booked yet)(we want to find an apartment in an area near one of the long term parking facilities if you have any to recommend)

11- Paris - Auvers-sur-Oise
Chateau de Malmaison
sleep Vernon

12- Giverny
Monet's H & G (we plan to stay here several hours)
Les Andelys, Chateau
drive & sleep Rouen

13- Look around Rouen, drive to / sleep Honfleur

14- Drive to/ sleep Caen

15- Tour of landing beaches
drive to / sleep Mont Saint-Michael

16- Mont Saint Michael
drive to Saint Malo
drive to / sleep Tours (area)

17 - Chenonceaux
Chateau de Cheverny
drive to / sleep 2 nts (?) Blois

18- Chateau de Chambord
Blois Chateau
sleep Blois (?)

19- Drive to Avignon +/- 8hrs (anything you can recommend en route?)
Sleep Avignon

20- Drive to St. Raphael
Continue to Cannes (sleep 2 nts)(visit friends)

21- Cannes - Nice - Monaco
(sleep area Monaco?)

I've "winged it" around France at that time of year and others a few times, but I had a pre-planned list of possible places to stay and telephone numbers and a cell phone, and I speak pretty much fluent French, so calling a hotel at 9 am in the morning as I was starting out on my travels for the day wasn't an issue.

If I didn't speak French and didn't have a list of potential accommodation sites for the night, I'd never do this. Because the options are finding the tourist office in a town and putting yourself at their mercy for a place to stay - which might or might not turn out to be acceptable - or driving around and stopping at various hotels and whatnot and hoping for a good deal (and trust me, the people who planned ahead already got the good deals) - all of which cuts majorly into your available time to vacation.

Your call.

Oh, and are you referring to Alsace-Lorraine or the Loire Valley? (not that it makes a difference in terms of reserving accommodations).

It's the Loire Valley.

Help!

If you could rent a nice apartment here:
Place Vauban (Invalides - Paris 07th) for 1,400EUR for 9 nights, with everything you need for comfort, would you do it?

I'm personally most interested in visiting the big art museums and of course the tower, and being in an area that reeks of Paris, but not of flaming tourists.

Also have an option of another, nice but smaller one here: 15th arrondissement @ Rue Saint-Charles & Rue du Theatre, top floor w elevator. 920EUR

It's been difficult to find an apartment, understanding exactly where it is at, and your help is really needed.

I know it's quite a difference in price, but manageable and in areas I think we'd be happy in.

It turns out that when asking for details on an individual B&B in Gite de France, the languages spoken by the host are indicated. The OP could decide to make a list of only English-speaking B&Bs.

I would pick the Vauban place in a heartbeat, but I am a fan of the 7ème. I have no idea what you mean by "flaming tourists." And even as a dévotée of the 7ème, I see no compelling reason to be near the tower OR the "major art museums," which are scattered all over the city. Paris has a transportation system - it gets you anywhere easily in a short time.

I would never do it - but I have limited vacation time and don't want to waste it looking for a place to stay (that I may end up hating).

At a minimum you need to do the reserach and have a list of possible places and contact info with you - so you don't end up sleeping in the car. If you check a few of those places now - and find they are almost full you will have your answer.

As for apartments - need much mor einfo to comment.

I think Southam hits it on the nose--you'll pay more and not have the choice of the place you really might enjoy more.
When we took our kids to Europe we DID wing it--it was pre-internet. We were able to go to the tourist desk at the train stations or tourist office to get them to make a reservation. Is this done any more?
The idea of the Logis or Ibis hotels would also be a possibility. They are clean and reasonable.
But there is the time factor also of driving around to find them.

I think your "tour" of Normandy is pretty quick. You are spending one day from Caen to MSM total. A real drive by. The Bayeux Tapestry is REALLY worth a stop also.
You are driving from Loire to Provence and then through Provence to the coast. Do you intend to just drive and not see anything?
And then do you go back to germany? Where are you turning the car in?
Is this your own car?

-you'll pay more and not have the choice of the place you really might enjoy more.

Not necessarily true. In fact, I think that the B&B system in France is cheaper than the hotel and generally more pleasant. Tourist offices in large towns still offer at least a listing of what is available, and in Vannes--the only town where I tried the system--there was an interactive computer screen outside the office for after hours usage. In Scotland we found B&B rooms through the tourist office about half the time. I don't wing it in large cities because of the logistics of hauling baggage from one place to the other if one establishment happens to be full. Of course, one can have bad experiences while winging it, but then one can have bad experiences with reserved rooms.

We are reluctant to go without reservations in Italy because of a couple too close for comfort experiences in Siena and Urbino, plus an uncomfortable first night in Tarquinia; but as I think of it, we had no problems in Orvieto, near Viterbo (the tourist office sent us to Bagnaia), Gubbio, Perugia, Spoleto. This was in October 1994, and things may have change since. More recently we winged it in Sicily except for our stay in Palermo. The price was probably more than my wife and I would have paid, but our travel companions made these decisions.

Our Italian experience might be more relevant for the OP in that we do not speak Italian (or Turkish or Romanian to list other places where we went without reservations) whereas I do speak French.

For your day in Normandy, I suggest that you stay in Bayeux rather than Caen. Bayeux is a much more charming town and is as convenient to the WWII sights. And the Bayeux tapestry is a "must see" in my opinion.

Ooh, this thread makes be want to grab the gites guide and Sawdays and head to France. We used both very successfully in several areas of France a few years ago. Had never heard of Sawdays until I picked up one of his guides that someone had left in a B&B in France.

Bon voyage!

StCirq : Maybe a better choice would have been 'tourism'. I hate places that are so full of tourists that I can scream. I'm thinking the centers of Dresden or Prague, Fisherman's Warf in SF, Alexander Platz in Berlin, etc. Not being familiar with Paris, I can only go on comments I've seen, so input from people who have visited Paris more than we have is important.

Gretchen: Out trip is actually about 3 months. Including 3 weeks in France and 3 in Italy. I never expected to go to Normandy, my DH planned that, I really haven't even looked at it because I've been busy with other places and he's kind of taken over. We'll have the car the entire time and are picking up/dropping off at Frankfurt airport. In Paris there are places you can leave your car for a week for about 65EUR or so. Not too worried about it.

Without any argument, I've gotten him to agree to book ahead, and will certainly look at staying in Bayeux rather than Caen. He was glad you guys recommended that and also the tapestry.

Having now planned on 9 nights in Paris, we are still working on finding an apartment. Unfortunately, we have had to wait for people to get back to us, but will no doubt decide on one tonight. He has selected a few more in the area of Marias and the 3rd...just as I was kind of getting used to the idea of the other two in the 7th and 15th

We already have a villa in Florence booked, and will work on Sorrento & Rome after we finish France, which hopefully will be in the next day or two.

Not sure we can extend our stay in Normandy as we still have to drive through the S on our way to Italy.

I'll be back...

Any of the highlights in Paris will be full of tourists: Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, la Sainte-Chapelle, a good part of the 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissement. Face it, you are adding to the numbers.