Our trip to Paris and beyond -help!!!!!!
 

We are planning to spend a week in Paris and then go to the Normandy Beaches, cemeteries and tour them. How many nights do we need to spend there? We would like a guided tour but not with a large group. (There are four of us.) The other area that we would like to go to is near Reims so we would like to see Reims but go to Epernay and visit the champagne caves. Should we rent a car in Paris? Or take the train to Normandy area and rent one there? Should we go to Epernay first? Is that just a one or two day sight to visit?Thanks for any help you can give us. Trying to sort it all out.

Why not take the train to Reims - an easy trip - and rent the car there. You may want to spend about 5 days seeing Reims, Epernay and the Normandy beaches. For the beaches, stay in Bayeux. You can arrange for a private guide from there. Someone on this board is sure to know the name of a good one. We went with French friends so did not hire a guide.

I like to "consolidate" when planning, end up in Paris (if we are leaving from CDG). I'd go to Normandy by car from CDG, stay as many nights as you "have", return to Paris, maybe via Chartres. Then Paris and take a day trip to Reims by train.

Hi Istamu, we just got back (last night in fact) and would be happy to share our experience (stay tuned for the trip report when I get some time). We spent two nights in Normandy - one doing the route de fromage (cheese route) and one visiting Bayeux and the Normandy beaches. Depending on your interest in D-Day you could easily spend two whole days visiting the D-Day museums, sites, cemetaries etc. For us one day was fine. As we were not confident about driving in a new country, and didn't want to confine ourselves to the cities we hired Bruce and Veronique from French Mystique Tours as guides. They were fantastic, picked us up at our hotel in Paris and drove us all around Normandy and the Loire - the tour was totally customized to our interests, and they were utterly flexible - if we saw something interesting we just stopped to check it out - if we were tired we cut things short. The link to their site is

http://www.frenchmystiquetours.com/about_us

You might also want to consider adding Mont St. Michel to the Normandy part of things - for me it was the highlight of the trip. Enjoy!

Thanks so much for all of your good suggestions. I will be looking into all of them. Mont St. Michel is something that I wanted to do also. I love this forum!