Will be in Paris for 5 days and would appreciate info as to best transportation for 2, train, air, or car to Lourdes for 2/3 days. What is the approximate travel time for each method of travel. Thanks again.

Hi Isabelle,

I did a similar trip back in 1998, so the following is all approximate times, as best as I can remember. We flew into Paris then took a connecting flight to Toulouse;I don't think that flight was more than an hour or two. We used Toulouse as our base to visit Lourdes and took the train there the next day, which was 1-2 hours, and returned to Toulouse at the end of the day. The next day we took the (bullet) train from Toulouse to Paris, which took most of the day.

Again, my memory may be too fuzzy, so you may want to do some quick checks on on airline and train websites to be sure. Hope this helps somewhat...

Back again...I had a quick look online because after posting the above, I was just too curious to see how accurate my memory is.

Turns out I was fairly close. According to Air France (http://www.airfrance.com/) the flight from Paris to Toulouse is a little over 1 hour. And according to the SNCF train website (http://www.sncf.com/indexe.htm) the train from Toulouse to Lourdes is about 2 hours and the train from Toulouse to Paris is approximately 6 hours (so it wasn't a full-day train ride).

Don't know what the driving time is, but I would think that would be much longer. Also don't know if there are any direct routes, either by train or plane, from Paris to Lourdes. Good luck!

Thanks so much Susie....your research is great!

If you're short of time, why not just fly straight to Lourdes from Orly on AF? Flight time about 90 mins: two flights daily. Cheapoes don't fly there from Paris, though there are loads of charters from virtualy everywhere else in Europe throughout the year, and there are usually cheapo scheduled flights during the winter, at least from London (it's a gateway airport for Pyrennean skiing).

5.5 hours by daily TGV from Paris. I'd guess you could drive it in a day (see the viamichelin site for times), but it'd be a shlep.