We are visiting Giverny for a week in May and would like to try a bed and breakfast accommodation. Any recommendations? We will be renting a car from the airport and heading straight to Giverny. How about places to see?
Thanks

A WEEK in Giverny? Whatever for? Are you artists or doing some research on Monet or what?

We're not artists. It will be our base to see upper and lower Normandy.

I could think of a lot better places to base than Giverny, very limited places to eat and no services nearby

If you want to explore upper and lower Normandy there are better places to be than Giverny. If you just wanted a quiet place for a few days Giverny would be fine but there are only a couple of restaurants in town and no other services. Vernon is only a few kilometers away for services but even there you're not well positioned to explore upper and lower Normandy. The best place for this would be to base in Honfleur and in May it shouldn't be too crowded although there will still be plenty of tourists. If you want someplace more "authentic" than Honfleur and with only locals and no tourists then head about 15km east and slightly south of Honfleur and base in Pont-Audemer. Plenty of services and restos and only locals, no tourists.

http://www.ville-pont-audemer.fr/accueil.php

Of course, you don't say what places you want to visit in upper and lower Normandy and if you mentioned that perhaps other suggestions could be made for an appropriate base.

Giverny itself is tiny and there's quite a bit of traffic. You might want a less touristic village. Have you tried Gites de France to find a cottage or a B&B room elsewhere in the area? Of course, if you've fallen in love with a specific lodging in Giverny, by all means go ahead! With a car you can cover a lot of territory.

This is a lovely area and I could well see spending a week there. Just down the road is La Roche-Guyon, one of the most beautiful villages of France, at the base of white cliffs and right along a bend of the Seine. Market day (well, morning) at Vernon is fun. Les Andelys is pleasant. Louviers has the House of Broken Crockery and a lovely section along its canal/river (I can't remember which). Rouen is about an hour away. There are beautiful drives and good restaurants in this area.

However, whatever I can tell you pales beside the trip reports of regular poster FMT. He travels by bike or by car and he reports in depth on wherever he goes. (It helps that he lives in France.) This is a day out with his wife near Giverny.

http://anyportinastorm.proboards.com...8&page=1#80797

He also biked this area, but I don't have a link to that trip report at the moment.

Roche-Guyon is a good suggestion. You can visit nearby Giverny and then head out to see more of Normandy.
Be sure the taste the Calvados, much better than I can buy here.

Thanks for mention Coquelicot. Indeed there are many lovely places to explore near Giverny but I think if the OP tells us where exactly they want to visit it might be easier to make suggestions as to whether or not Giverny makes the best base.

To the OP, if you don't know what you want to see everyone here is happy to help makes suggestions but I would suggest in the meantime that you get a good map of the area and also a guidebook or two. You need to have some basic knowledge about what your options are in Normandy. Once you know some of the basics and can tell us what interests you then you'll get much better suggestions here. I've got lots of suggestions to make but I'll wait for you to come back and tell us a bit more about what you are looking for.

Thank you for the responses. Instead of Giverny, we will be using Honfleur as our base. We will be driving from Paris to Giverny - stay for the night then head to Honfleur via Rouen. How is the traffic from Paris to Giverny? We arrive around 11am at CDG, pick up the car then head straight to Giverny. Will that be too much, we are coming from the west coast?
We plan to do day trips to Deauville, Bayeux, Mont St Michel, and Lisieux. Any other suggestions?.
Will parking be a problem? This will be our first driving around Paris and Normandy

You might want to spend a night or two in Rouen after Giverny. Great town, great sites, great restaurants!

On your way from Rouen to Honfleur, you might want to visit the Abbey of St. George de Boscherville (very sorry that I didn't make it here) and/or the Abbey of Jumieges (wow!).

Hi jack,

Myself and others will probably urge you not to drive after a long flight from the west coast as you will be tired and jet-lagged and driving on unfamiliar roads so not exactly a safe idea. I would suggest you take the train to Rouen, which means you need to go from CDG to Paris Saint-Lazare to get the train to Rouen and then you can rent a car in Rouen. Maybe you could spend your first day and night in Rouen and the next day go visit Giverny. With your flight arrival time even if you drove straight from the airport to Giverny you may be pressed for time to do a visit on your arrival day before Giverny closes.

Before I make any recommendations let me give you some basic tips I always suggest so you can be well prepared to visit France.

Get your hands on the Michelin maps. You want the ones of the scale 1:200,000 (regional maps) or 1:150,000 (departmental maps, more detailed, cover slightly less area) for whatever regions you visit. A nice feature of the 1:150,000 maps is they show the starred attractions in the corresponding Michelin Green guidebooks. The Michelin maps have icons for all kinds of historically/touristically interesting things such as châteaux, ruins, churches, abbeys, scenic view points, caves, Roman sites, megaliths, designated scenic roads and many other things. Usually when I'm exploring various regions in France I just look at the map and I am able to plan interesting and scenic drives just reading the map. For instance, I usually look for a designated scenic road, which are highlighted in green, and I especially look for towns with the historic church and/or château icon. I also try to make sure the route goes through as many small villages as possible. Usually putting all these things together I find interesting and scenic drives without even knowing where I am going and with no assistance from a guide book. Often these places are never mentioned in guidebooks and remain completely unknown to many tourists.

You can buy the Michelin maps from their website and here is a link to the page that shows all of the maps of France: http://tinyurl.com/4bt96ev

You could also buy them here but then you can't do research beforehand. The maps can be bought in many places such as bookstores, news stands, magazine stores, larger supermarkets, department stores, hypermarkets and in the full service rest areas on the autoroutes, just to name a few.

You need good guidebooks for whatever region in France in which you will be traveling. I like The Michelin Green Guides. If you need restaurant info then get The Michelin Red Guides, which cover restaurants.

And speaking of Michelin, you can go to the website viamichelin.com and get info on drive times and distances, toll and fuel costs and suggested routes (i.e. scenic routes). The drive times given do not consider stops (fuel, food, bathrooms) nor do they consider bad weather and traffic.

Here is some other general advice for you. You should google some of the town/tourist office websites for any towns you may want to visit. You will find loads of info on these websites including hotel/accommodation and restaurant info as well as what to see and do in the area. Occasionally the websites have English versions. In doing a google search enter the name of your town followed by the words "site officiel" or "office de tourisme" and this will bring the town to the top of your search.

Near Rouen you are aware of Giverny and also in that vicinity you can visit a Roche Guyon:

http://www.villagesdefrance.free.fr/...oche_guyon.htm

Le Petit Andely is a pretty little medieval village and on the cliff above town is Château Gaiilard, Richard the Lionheart's fortress ruin.

http://www.ville-andelys.fr/Tourisme_cms182.aspx

http://lesandelys.com/chateau-gaillard/

I haven't visited the abbeys mentioned by joannyc but they are supposed to be nice.

From Honfleur you are at the crossroads to upper and lower Normandy. In upper Normandy the highlight towns are Etretat and Fécamp as well as doing the scenic coastal drives in this area:

http://www.etretat.net/index2.php

http://www.fecamptourisme.com/

You know about Honfleur and Deauville but you shoud also visit Trouville, which is just across the harbor from Deauville:

http://www.trouvillesurmer.org/book/index.html

You mentioned Lisieux and if you head to this area you will be in the famous cheese and cider producing area known as the Pays d'Auge which has some lovely country scenery.

Look at the map and you'll see loads of scenic roads in the area between Lisieux and Pont-l'Evêque. Just driving randomly around the scenic roads is something I like to do, as long as you don't mind driving. Some of the highlight villages would be Touques (just a few km south of Deauville), Beaumont-en-Auge, Pont-l'Evêque (famous for its cheese), Beuvron-en-Auge, Blangy-le-Château, Cormeilles and Cambremer.

http://www.pays-auge.fr/

http://www.office-tourisme-cambremer...s-de-france-53

http://www.blangy-pontleveque.com/

http://www.pontleveque.com/web/index.php

http://www.office-tourisme-cormeilles.com/

South of Lisieux is really when you hit cheese and cider country and the scenery is lovely here too. If cheese and cider interest you I can recommend a couple of great places to visit here. First, the town of Camembert (as in the famous cheese) is a tiny little village with a museum and cheese for sampling. But a better cheese experience is just a few km south of here on a farm called Fromagerie Durand. This is the last farm in Normandy where the Camembert is still made by hand using traditional methods. In the morning you can watch (through a window) as Monsieur Durand pours the raw cheese into their moulds. If you arrive too late to see that there are plenty of signs there detailing the various stages of the cheese making process and it's quite informative. You can sample/buy some cheese and cider too. Here is some info about that farm:

normandiealaferme.com/normandie/ferme-fromag…

The other cheese/cider related site to visit is further north of here called Saint Hippolyte:

http://www.sainthippolyte.com/

It is a 16th century manor/estate with large fields, grazing cows, apple orchards and a cheese production facility that you can tour. A really lovely place. They have a great store in the office there with all kinds of local food products (cheese, cider, calvados, patés and much more) and if you brought some bread and fruit you could get whatever you need for a lovely picnic lunch on the grounds.

I'm sure you must be aware of all the D-Day stuff you could do near Bayeux and Caen so I'm skipping over that but I'll give you the tourist website for Bayeux.

http://www.bessin-normandie.com/

About 25km or so south of Caen is a region known as Suisse-Normande. I've never explored here but I've always wanted to and I know there is a lot of scenic countryside here. Look at your map and you'll see loads of scenic roads in the area around Thury-Harcourt and Clécy. Search you map and you'll see lots of scenic roads in nearby places as well. I've visited none of these places but I'm quite sure there is some lovely scenery here. Here is the tourist site for Suisse-Normande and another nearby area.

http://www.otourisme.com/otv2-sn/?-B...-en-normandie-

http://www.bocage-normand.com/fr/index.htm

I could mention other things to do here but this should give you plenty to start your research and then you can come back and ask more questions.

jackkane: According to viamichelin.com , it's a 1hr 05min drive (46 miles) from CDG airport to Giverny. Only you can assess how you feel after a long international flight and whether a drive like this is safe & possible.

Honfleur is a lovely town to base yourself! That's where we will be staying (again) on our up-coming trip!

Have fun planning!

FrenchMystiqueTours - Thanks for the list of charming Normandy villages + links! We are headed there in September (second visit) so it will be fun to stop in some of these places. You are right, it is a very pretty area to drive through!

If you want to see some pictures of the Pays d'Auge (and Trouville) you can check out some of my Facebook photos:

http://tinyurl.com/7xhz6v5

Thanks everyone! My wife and I are considering the option of not driving from CDG to Giverny, and take the train instead. How up to date is the GPS? Will it know small roads and the like?
My wife insisted on one.

We will get the Michelin map that you all are talking about. I forgot to mention that this is a 2 week vacation, the 1st leg is Normandy and the 2nd is Paris. This is our 3rd for Paris and 1st for Normandy.
Are bed and breakfast in Honfleur a good option or hotels? Has any of you stayed at the La Maison du Parc in Honfleur? This is where my wife wants to stay. Any suggestions for Rouen?

Thanks again

There is no direct train to Giverny. You take the train to Vernon and then a bus (or hire a bike). If you're continuing on to other spots in Normandy, I would just rent a car and drive out of Paris. It's no big deal. Can't help you with GPS; I just use maps. France has some of the best signage in the world.

When we visited Giverny, we drove from CDG after overnight flight from DFW. It is an easy drive, and we had no problems. We stayed in a B&B overnight in Giverny, visited Monet's gardens and relaxed. We drove on to Honfleur the next day to see the sights there. From Honfleur we moved on to Bayeux where we did the D-Day sights,saw the tapestry, Mont St Michael, etc. Also, on the drive from Honfleur to Bayeux, we stopped in some of the small villages on the cider route.

The B&B in Giverny: http://www.giverny-leclosfleuri.fr/b...ast/index.html

The B&B in Honfluer: http://www.coursaintecatherine.com/GB_maison.htm
We are staying at this B&B again in September.

In Honfleur, we will be staying at the Hotel L'Ecrin. It has private parking.

www.honfleur.com/default-ecrin.htm

In September my husband and I arrived from the west coast to CDG with a stop in Frankfort and arrived about noon. We then drove to Giverny. Got stuck in a terrible traffic jam in Paris. Despite taking almost 3 hours to get to GIverny, we were not tired and did not find it difficult to drive there. We stayed at a delightful B&B just a mile up the hill from GIverny proper, La Reserve.
We found it very relaxing and quiet for the 2 nights we stayed before heading off to Honfleur.
The breakfasts are amazing and the hostess, Valerie, is delightful. I think if you can stay 2 nights in Giverny, the first night having an early dinner and going to bed early to get in the time zone, spending the next day exploring the town, gardens, and Vernon, you can leave early the following day to explore Chateau Gaillard in Les Andelys or Louviers before getting to Rouen for lunch.

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