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My husband and I are attending a wedding in Nantes in July, 2012. We'd love to fly into Barcelona and stay there for a few days. Then travel to Nantes (through Bordeaux, where we'd stop for some wine tasting) and finally, after the wedding, we'd travel to Paris for a few days. Our prelim itinerary would be:
Thurs - Sun in Barcelona
Mon - Thurs travel through Bordeaux to Nantes
Fri - Sun in Nantes for wedding
Mon - Wed in Paris
Our questions are:
1. Does this make sense? Is it doable?
2. Should we rent a car? Or will we be able to utilize the trains/public transport and still enjoy the Bordeaux wine region?
3. We don't speak French. Will it be difficult to book hotel rooms in the French countryside? If so, what's our option?
Thanks so much for any help you can give. We appreciate it!
Wedding in Nantes. Want to travel from Barcelona to Paris.
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No doubt it is possible to travel this route by train but the on-line sites will want to send you to Nantes via Paris. You will have to specify stations where you will change trains or stop over to coax the sites into patching together an itinerary through Bordeaux. Whatever your route, it will be a fairly long ride.
The budget airline Veuling http://www.vueling.com/EN/ flies non-stop Barcelona to Nantes. The earlier you buy your ticket, the cheaper the fare.
As to not speaking French, persons in the tourist trade will accommodate you. Nantes is a big enough city that its main train station should have an English-speaking ticket agent for obtaining local train tickets.
If you rent a car in Spain and drop it off in France, you will pay a huge fee to do so. I assume your plan is to buy open-jaw tickets, into Barcelona and out of Paris? That would be the logical thing to do.
You can research trains from Barcelona to Bordeaux on Renfe.com and www-voyages-sncf.com. Once in Bordeaux you can book wine tours through the Tourist Office or the Maison du Vin (actually, do this online ahead of time). From Bordeaux to Nantes on the train, go back to www.voyages-sncf.com.
I don't know how you'll get out to the "French countryside" without a car, but lack of French should just be a hindrance, not a completely limiting factor.