Car rentals often have a steep drop off charge for renting in one country and dropping in another - plus a car is useless in the C T and Venice of course - both do not allow cars which must be parked at the entrances to the towns at a pretty penny to boot.

What are you going to the CT for - if not to hike between the five villages - a total of about 7 miles I think - you may find one day enough - trains go all the time between the 5 lands as do boats in tourist seasons.

Trains have gotten better on that route with the re-introduction of Nice to Genoa direct trains - one leaves around 9 am or so - most connections by rail necessitate a change of trains in Ventimiglia, the Italian border town and are much slower than this EC train, run by Thello - www.thello.com for discounted tickets to Genoa - from there it is mainly regional or IC trains that have a pretty flat fare with no big savings for advance purchase - you cannot even reserve regional trains in Italy.

You can get big discounts Paris to Nice as mentioned before at www.capitainetrain.com or www.voyages-sncf.com - same trains different booking engines and same prices I think. www.idTGV is a discount scheme also for TGV trains serving that route (perhaps not sure).

Overall your itinerary seems sweet - if you wanted to substitute Florence for the CT it would be easy - just as quick about to get to Florence from Nice by train (or flight to Pisa or Florence airports) and Florence to Venice is quicker than CT to Venice by a lot I think - by train that is.

Two day trips from Paris out of 5 days? Please.

What day trips are you doing - if Versailles is one well that to me is in Paris for all practical purposes.

Gretchen, thank you for your ever-so-helpful and highly constructive comment.

PalenQ, thank you for sharing your thoughts on CT/Florence. I could hike between the five villages (and would love to), but I will have my daughter and 62-year old aunt, so maybe a combination of hiking and boat rides? I really haven't looked into CT much yet. I just had two people this weekend tell me it was one of the highlights of their Europe trip, so it's a very recent possible addition to our itinerary.

From Paris, the days trips we have in mind are Versailles and Giverny. Both are reasonably close to Paris. Many tour companies do Giverny as a half-day trip, so we could possibly do Giverny and another attraction in Paris on the same day, or just do Giverny and have some down time.