My sister and I have an overnight stay in Paris in April. I've been to Paris twice but 30 years ago! I was hoping we could find time to see Chartres before we head back off to London, but we'd probably only have about 2 hours to explore before we had to get back to NORD for the Eurostar back to London. My question is: if we center on mostly the ancient and medieval sites of Paris (which is what we are most interest in), would there be time to see Chartres on our last day before having to leave? Or should we take it a little easier and enjoy Paris this time?

Chartres has a lovely cathedral - but in the very limited time you have you will barely begin to scratch the surface of ancient and midieval places in Paris.

Yes, I'm sure you're right about our not being able to see a very large part of medieval Paris in less than 2 days. Which makes the decision to either stay and see more of Paris or rush to see a bit of Chartres all the harder! I've been told that Chartres has a very different 'feel' than Paris and that one should experience places other than Paris if possible. And I would dearly love to see Chartres. But to cram an afternoon trip to Chartres in (around 1:30-3:30pm) and then have to go back to Paris and grab the Eurostar back to London around 5:30pm, well, I wonder if we'd be taking on more than we could reasonably handle? One of our biggest problems is having to leave Paris around 5:30pm in order to get to London and still be able to ride the tube to a suburb about an hour away. If we come in too late, there'll be no tube service (Watford), and the buses are a bit daunting to me at midnight or so! So seeing a bit of Chartres for 2 hours - is it worth it? Advice would be much appreciated!

I need to get this straight - you want to see some of Paris in the a.m., travel from Montparnasse to Chartres, visit the cathedral and maybe a bit more, travel back to Montparnasse, then to Nord, then to waterloo, and THEN to Watford - on the same day?!?

Spelled out that way what do you think? IMHO it is a crazy idea.

Wow, the way you put it, it does sound crazy! Okay, I guess I just needed confirmation that it'd be way too much to do! Thank you for being straight with me. Now I can concentrate on our Paris plans!