Hi Tammy,

that's quite a journey to fit into 2 weeks - not saying it can't be done, but you'll need to be quite disciplined in what you leave out.


you are quite right about cross border one-way drop off fees, but you can avoid these by using the train to get across the border, or even flying, which would be my suggestion, given your time limitations.

Assuming you want to spend a few days in Paris, you could do this:

Days 1-4 - Paris.

Day 4 - TGV [fast train] to Nice, stay 4 nights.

Day 8 - fly from Nice to Venice, stay 3 nights,

Day 11 - train to Rome.

oops, no car with this one, but you would hardly need one].

alternatively, train from Nice to Turin, pick up car, drive to Tuscany [see Florence as a day trip as you definitely don't want a car there].

or train to the CT [Cinque Terre] , spending your time there before getting the train to Rome.

but the most important thing at this juncture is to make a plan and start booking!

It is not "outrageously" expensive to everybody to pick up one car and drop it off in another. It depends on the rate and how badly you want to do it.

But there is a 5 hour train from Paris to Torino, and while I have never taken it, I have read that it goes through a scenic route.

Leaving Torino, you could pick up a car and drive it into France, and then drop it off in Florence. From there use trains to get from Florence to Venice, and then Rome.

For me, I wouldn't enjoy spending so much time driving from the French Riviera to Florence. So I would drop France, and see the Italian Riviera instead, and I would do it all by train:

Paris to Torino
Torino to italian Riviera (3 hour train ride)
Italian Riviera to Florence (3 hour train ride)
Florence to Venice (2 hour train ride0
Venice to Rome (4 hours, I think).

Since you are starting so late, you should use booking.com and venere.com to look for places to stay, and I think you will face a lot of difficulty at this point finding nice accommodations in Paris, Venice, and perhaps Florence as well. It sounds like you don't have a guidebook.

I don't believe there is now a non-stop flight from Nice to Venice, only Nice to Rome. If you do that, you can take a fast train to Florence from Rome. But at that point, given the costs of air fare and trains, you might as well do a cost-comparison with renting a car in France and dropping it off in Italy if you'd rather be driving.

I think your biggest problem is not havinghotel reservations. Good places at moderate/modest prices tend to seel out early and you may find it difficult to get somehwere unless you are flexible about amenities and/or cost.

Your list of places is way too long for a two week trip. And driving doens; tmake sense since you don;t have alot of countryside on your trip.

And this is from someone who has done numerous road trips all over europe and loves to drive there. But cars are worse than useless in cities and that's all you have on your itinerary. If you were doing just Paris and Riviera picking up a car when leaving Paris would make perfect sense - you could stop in a couple of places driving down and use the car there to visit a number of towns and villages along the coast and in the mountains behind. Or if you were doing just Italy and wanted to explre the small towns of Tuscany a car wold make sense there. But not in any of these cities.

If it were me I would pick 3 or at most 4 hotels, train between cities to at least view a little of the countryside. This sill give you the chance to see more than the top 2 sights in any one place and to begin to get a feel for a couple of them.

(And I hop you two weeks is actually 17 days - that is you are flying out on a Friday night and returning home on the Sunday two weeks later - otherwise you may really have only 12 days on the ground.)

Finally, all major cities in europe are safe - although almost every city has a few areas where tourists shouldn;t wander alone - but they won;t have lots of hotels or sights - so why should you be there.

Again I urge yuoto try to make reservations TODAY - to have the best choice of what is left. (Think of this as Christmas shopping on Dec 23rd.)

I can't thank everyone enough for getting back to me so quickly. We arrive in Paris May 12th and leave Rome May 27th, so with travel time it is 17 days.
I was stuck on the car idea because I've always wanted to visit the beaches of Normandy, Mont-St-Michel, Burgundy/Bordeaux regions of France, and my mom has always wanted to see Tuscany.
I think I like the idea of dropping the car in Nice, taking the train to Turin, and then renting the car ....seeing Tuscany, then maybe dropping off the car and making Florence "home base" for a few days, and finish the trip by train. Day trips to Venice, Pisa, then a train to Rome...
thoughts?

Paris, Normandy beaches, le Mont-St-Michel,Burgundy, Bordeaux, Nice, Turin, Tuscany (including Florence), Venice, Pisa, Rome...it's still WAY WAY too much for the time allotted.

bloody hell! not on your life. this is two trips in one [if not more].

IMHO the only way to do this is to drop Paris. and Bordeaux which is WAY off track.

Here you go:

Day 1 - arrive at CDG. rent car, drive to normandy. tour.

Day 4 - TGV to Dijon, pick up car, tour burgundy for 3 days.

Day 7 - drive south to Nice, tour for 3 days.

Day 10 - train to ? in Italy [Pisa?] tour city, pick up car, drive to ?

Days 11-15 - tour Tuscany with day trip to Florence [forget Venice, it's too far for a day trip]

Day 15 - Return car in ?orvieto, Train to Rome.

day 17 - fly home.

this is busy, but not undoable. more than this, and you'll never want to come back.

bloody hell! not on your life.

annhig, exactly what I was thinking, but so much more succinct.

Paris + Normandy (you'd need at least two days to do what's on your list) + Bordeaux + Burgundy + Nice + Tuscany + Rome is way, way too much for two weeks, even forgetting Venice, Florence and anything between Nice and Tuscany.

You really do need to get an itinerary set and hotel reservations made as quickly as possible - a month is not much time, and May is not the highest season but is still a popular time to travel. For some of your destinations, this would be my personal minimum time that I'd spend (more usually wouldn't hurt):

Paris and Rome - at absolute minimum two full days, preferably three; you can easily spend four or more, especially in Paris or with day trips from either
Florence - at least one full day; you could do this as a day trip from somewhere in Tuscany - I don't know specifics but there are threads here about it
Venice - at least one full day, but preferably two

That does NOT include time getting from place to place. Rome to Venice is around 3-3.5 hours by train, if I remember correctly; trenitalia.com is the Italian train system web site (there is an English version), so you can check journey times. The stations you want for those cities are Roma Termini, Venezia S.L. (stands for Santa Lucia), and Firenze S.M.N. Expect to take at least half a day when you change cities.

I haven't been to the south of France so can't speak to that. You can see the D-day landing sites with a day tour from Paris. This is a very long day and I'd add at least one day to Paris if you choose to do that.

You really need to seriously rethink this trip. There is no way - train or car - that you can get to all of these places and see anything at all.

To see even the most basics in Paris and Rome you need 3 days (4 nights) each. If you want to do day trips you need to add extra days.

To visit all of the places you want you won't even have 1 day in each place - once you deduct the travel time. Car or train and hotels is not your problem now that I see your desired itinerary.

You need a map and to check out the travel times on viamichelin,.com - or look at bahn.de to see train times and schedules. You simply CANNOT see 15 differnt cities and areas in 17 days - unless you have a private helicopter at your disposal - and then a lot of it would be fly bys.

For isntance - you say you want the Burgundy/Bordeaux areas - each one of these is 2 or 3 days to see anything - and they are nowhere near one another. Travel between the two would be almost a full day. (Via Michelin shows fastest drive time of 7 hours - with stops for fuel, food and biobreaks this is between 8 and 9 hours - and you haven't seen either place).

I'm not sure if you have massively underestimated the size of europe - or if you just havne't looked at a map/distances - but this trip is simply not possible - unless you are planning on getting in a car and driving for 17 days - and not actually stop to see anything.

lol, I wasn't planning on doing it all. I knew I'd have to do a bit of editing. As it stands now, I'll spend 3 days in Paris, then rent a car and drive south (I'm thinking Burgundy rather than Bordeaux) and spend a day or two in the south before dropping the car. Then I'll spend the rest of the trip taking trains through Italy, perhaps only renting a car for the day to see Tuscany. And yes, I will be eliminating a city or two from my previous list.

I wouldn't rent a car in Paris to drive to Burgundy; you can get there by train in a short time and pick up a car there.

taking the train to Turin, and then renting the car ....seeing Tuscany, then maybe dropping off the car and making Florence "home base" for a few days, and finish the trip by train. Day trips to Venice, Pisa, then a train to Rome...

Most of "seeing Tuscany" is south of Florence. Driving from Turin to Florence would not give you the opportunity to visit Tuscany. On the other hand, you could visit Venice (parking in Mestre by the RR station is very reasonable--something like 5 or 7 euros a day when we were there), or you could pass by Pisa and Lucca on your way to Florence.

You only live once, go for it!



dave

I give up. Several people here have tried to give you very good advice - but you seem determined to do a quick-paced forced march across the face of europe (11 places in 17 days is still not really doable).

Perhaps you will be able to pull this off. (You couldn;t pay me enought to waste my time this way.)

I wish you the best - but don't complain if you end up spending the bulk of your time in transit.

<<I'm thinking Burgundy rather than Bordeaux>>

Meant to add to my last comment that this shows, to me at least, that you really haven't looked at a map (which is fine if you just want to wander aimlessly around). Of COURSE Bordeaux is out of the question on your "itinerary." It's not even remotely in the direction you seem to want to head.

So yes, Burgundy is clearly the better choice for someone aiming for Italy.

Good luck with this.

I have pasted my itinerary below. I arrived in Paris on December 16 and stayed with a friend (3 days), so this part is not on the itinerary. Obviously, it all depends on what you want to see and do.

It was a whirlwind, but I am used to very fast-paced and worked for me. I was traveling with my best friend and we are in our mid-twenties. We went for reasonably priced hotels that were simple; we were rarely in the room so didn't care much about amenities. We did not enjoy our Rome hotel, but it was under construction at the time. Others worked great for us. We booked our day trip train tickets the day of our excursions. Others we booked ahead of time. We flew from Paris to Venice.

Again, not a perfect itinerary for everyone but worked well for us! Hope you assemble one perfect for you!

VENICE
HOTEL - Ca' Bragadin Carabba
December 19: arr VENICE, sleep VENICE
December 20: VENICE
December 21: travel VERONA, sleep VENICE

(TRAIN - Venice to Florence 7:39 a.m. - 9:35 a.m.)


FLORENCE
HOTEL - Hotel Perseo
December 22: travel FLORENCE, sleep FLORENCE
December 23: travel PISA, sleep FLORENCE

(TRAIN - Florence to Rome 7:13 p.m. - 9:45 p.m.)

ROME
HOTEL - Hotel Morgana
December 24: travel ROME, sleep ROME
December 25: ROME
December 26: travel OSTIA ANTICA, sleep ROME
December 27: ROME
December 28: depart

I can't thank everyone enough for your advice. Your responses really helped me decide on transporation and a workable itinerary.
It's still going to be a whirlwind (of fun) but here's what I decided on.
May 12-15-Paris
rent a car on May 15th-drive south (stopping at the Loire Valley, and checking out a vineyard or two in the French countryside on the way to Nice)
May 21st-train from Nice to Florence
May 21-24 Florence (and I am booking a tour to Tuscany/Pisa one of those days)
May 24-train to Rome
May 27-fly home

Another question I have is since I wanted to leave my itinerary pretty 'open' from May 15-21, do you think we will be able to 'wing it' and find affordable hotels as we go? I plan on booking the rest but wanted a bit of freedom while we're driving.

Hi Tammy,

glad that your trip is coming together.

ref leaving things open for a few days, with just 2 of you, in May, you really should have no problems. we have done this a number of times, including once or twice with our kids, and never ended up without a place to lay our heads, though one nights when there was a strike in Paris things got a bit dicey!

it would help to do a bit of homework, and perhaps to identify a few areas in which you might be interested; also having an up to date red michelin guide is a good idea because it has not only hotel and restaurant listings, but also excellent town plans showing the routes in and out.

if you are planning to stay in Nice, I would book ahead.