We will have a rental car when we are staying in St. Remy. Having read reports of difficult driving and parking in Avignon, we would like to minimize it, if possible. Would it make sense to drive to the TVG train station, park in their garage, and then take the shuttle bus into town? Or are there other alternatives? One more question: Is driving in Aix difficult?

Drive to the "in town" train station garage & park there - that's what we do. It's just outside the Medieval walls & easy to get to.

Stu Dudley

no, you don't need to do that. You don't need to drive around in the middle of town, just drive into the large parking garage under the main plaza. It's easy to enter, right off the main highway which is the same one the TGV station is located on. I would not train to the Avignon train station to park, but it might depend where you are coming from. I just think entering that large parking garage from the main road running along the river is the easiest thing to do. You enter the parking garage right at the Pont St-Benezet (Porte du Rocher).

I found Aix very difficult to drive within, although I didn't drive in the middle of Avignon, just parked. But it was difficult for me to find parking in Aix as the main garage near the main place de la Liberation was full, and also, I had to get on the opposite side of the city and there are a lot of small, one-way streets and it wasn't clear how to get where I wanted to go, even though I knew exactly where I wanted to be. I ended up on a wrong major road going the wrong direction and sometimes it's hard to get off those big roads. Now I speak French and had to stop twice to ask directions, so I wasn't really worried exactly, and I got them, but if I didn't speak French, it would have been harder as those folks didn't speak English.

I think one can assume that driving in any very old city is going to be difficult, and both these have a population of around 100K. It's not so hard in small towns, of course.

We found open parking lots outside the wall along the river in Avignon. It wasn't difficult and there was no charge. Easy to walk into the center.

Aix was another matter - we found a garage after some effort along the inner ring road. Then it was easy to walk into the center. Driving into Aix was more difficult than leaving (as it usually is in the bigger towns).

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. It sounds as though parking in Avignon won't be as difficult as we thought.

Parking in Avignon is fairly easy; there are underground garages, including one very near the Palais des Papes. But in Aix, parking is an absolute nightmare We would probably still be driving around and around if someone hadn't pulled out of a space as we were about to pass.

I did not find driving in Aix difficult, but still was too stupid to find the central parking garage near Pl de Gaulle I had wanted to go to. But it was no big deal, since I simply went to the parking lot of the train station (SNCF/downtown, not Aix TGV!), which was 2nd on my list. Only had to walk appr. 300 yards to Cours Mirabeau, and I think it was not even very expensive.

A printed map of Aix made navigating quite easy:
http://www.aixenprovencetourism.com/uk/aix-plans.htm#
The "outskirts" map is good for going to/from town by car.

Thanks, Cowboy1968, for the Aix maps.

We've just returned from the region and found it easy to park in garages in Avignon, Nimes and Arles. There's one in Avignon right at Palais des Papes.