RER ticket to Zone 3
 

We will be using the RER to go to zone 3 for a one day excursion. We'll use our metro tickets, which we already have, to get to Nation to connect to the RER 2 line.

We had some trouble/misunderstanding about this same type of thing years ago. It seems that we should be able to purchase individual round trip RER tickets and use them for this part of our journey. Am I missing something here?

Out of curiousity, how much would the additional RER tickets cost?

Nina

try using www.transilien.com (leave it in French) to get the ticket prices (I don't think it shows the prices on english version).

Also - try starting at your nearest metro as the departure, and then your Zone 3 destination.

You should be able to go on the one ticket, as long as you can correspond to the RER.

Travelnut, that is what we had planned to do. Take the metro with our regular tickets, only good for zones 1 and 2, from Pl d'Italie directly to Nation to connect to the RER. Since our RER stop is in zone 3, wouldn't we have to pay more to go there?

I apologize if my questions sound dumb and confusing, but it will be on our first full day of this trip, in Paris, and we figure that we will probably be half asleep and wanted to make it as easy as possible.

I learned many many trips ago, never to argue with a station attendant. Just asking for info from them is often difficult enough.

Nina

I picked a station in zone 3 (Sceaux) and put your itinerary into Transilien.com

Place d'Italie
Sceaux

The itinerary is to take metro line 6 to Denfert Rochereau, then change to the RER at Denfert Rochereau and onward to Sceaux on the RER. A one-way price was 2.05€

So I'm thinking that you buy this ticket (round-trip, though) at Place d'Italie and then you don't use one of your regular metro tickets. This should work b/c the metro and RER are in the same station.

If you had to exit the metro system to walk above ground to an RER line, then you'd have to use 2 separate tickets.

Thanks Travelnut. I did check on the site for the schedues Pl. d'Italie - Champigny (REH 2) and found it easily.

I'm not too concerned about the cost of the RER tickets, I was just curious. I will try to buy the R/T tickets the day before at Pl Italie just to make things go more smoothly. Sometimes it takes us a few days to wake up, hopefully this will not be one of those times.

We leave SFO at 7:40AM and arrive at CDG at 7:20AM, which includes a change of planes at Dulles. It should be fun trying to stay awake until bedtime ;-)
We usually leave SFO at 4:30PM and arrive at 12:30PM on a direct flight.

Sometimes those quick naps turn into hours and then we are up 4:00AM eating or staring at the ceiling.

I'm making myself tired already and we don't leave until Wednesday.

It's either ask dumb questions or clean my house .... that's a no brainer ;-)

Nina

Just one word of warning. If you try and go farther than you have paid for, the turnstiles at the other end will not let you out of the RER station. Therefore, it might be safest to buy the RER tickets as a separate thing, just to be sure they are correct.

Just to confirm, there is no need to use a regular metro ticket plus a special one to go to zone 3. You simply buy a ticket that takes you all the way to zone 3 from your departure in zone 1.