Driving tour of France

Here is my link to my blog about our 16 day driving trip to the 5 major wine regions in May/June 2017. We drove over 1,800 miles. Hope you enjoy - we certainly did. We had great food and great wine and the countryside was gorgeous. A great way around France. Driving was easy, but watch out for enforcement zones (photo speed zones). Use Waze and it will tell you when you are in them.

French Countryside Tour - 2018

Hop you enjoy it and get some good ideas.

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WacoTiger

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Damn, that is an excellent blog you guys put together. I appreciate you sharing it. Only problem in viewing it was realizing we were going to wait another eleven months before doing the driving tour.

I think the driving will be ok since we are driving on the same side of the road as in the states. The main thing I wanted to do was stay out of driving in Paris and I think that I will be able to skip the city driving.

Thanks again for sharing the blog

We drove the south of France for 18 days a few years ago. It was pretty great.

Agreed - that's an excellent blog.

We just got back from 12 days in France. Trip included 6 nights in Paris and 4 nights in Bayeux. Try to book an apartment or hotel in Bayeux vs. Caen. You won't regret it.

If you are heading to the Loire Valley, check out Amboise. It's not as large as Orleans or Tours, but it does have some hotels and apartments. Easy town to drive to as well.

Ditto the suggestion to rent a vehicle at CDG and return it there. We stayed in Montparnasse area, and rented a car for the trip to Normandy from the Montparnasse station. Driving out of that neighborhood was tricky. On our return to Paris, we opted to bring the car to CDG instead.

One last thing - GPS navigation is good everywhere except on the CDG property. The inner and outer roads are so close together that the GPS gets confused. Read the road signs instead.

I love driving in Europe but be extremely careful driving the day of your arrival, and honestly I highly recommend NOT driving the day of your arrival. Arriving jet lagged and likely extremely tired is a bad time to drive, but its a terrible time to drive in a foreign country.

If you do choose to drive the first day, I highly HIGHLY recommend printing out some driving directions and reviewing them before you leave. Don't wait to get there even with a GPS. Don't make the first day a crazy drive. It can take some used to using a new GPS especially in a foreign country and again being tired makes that learning curve much harder.

Thinking more about your route: consider—
Cancale, where you can eat oysters from open air stands at the harbor and chuck the shells right into the ocean
Villedieu les Poeles, atown historically associated with coppersmithing. Mauviel cookware is made there, plus other small copper workshops.
Isigny sur Mer is only slightly out of your way....home to the big dairy company. Has a big outlet store selling all of its products. Caramels, cheeses, butter, ice cream, etc.

If you are into ancient sites, the standing stones at Carnac to the west of Saumur might be of interest. And France awards “prettiest village” prizes, it might be worth looking those up for Normandy/Brittany to see if slight detours might deliver more charm.

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Keep money handy for the tolls.

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My US chip (no pin) card worked just fine in every automatic toll machine along the autoroute at this time last year. No problems at all....and beware that many toll stops are 100% automatic w/no humans in sight.

Saumur has a tank museum and it’s the home of the French Cavalry school.

The Loire is all very similar, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Every town has a castle (nearby) and a winery. Not all towns have great restaurants though, so that may be worth scoping out. You could see if there’s a fun one star Michelin to anchor that leg of the trip.

When choosing a restaurant, look for a crowd, and look for a little image that looks like a house on the menu. It indicates that the food is made in house.

That tells you they’re actually cooking, and not reheating food from a bag.

I love Chinon, it has an impressive castle set above the Loire river.

I also love the little town of Montresor, the castle is occupied by a Polish noble family and it’s full of family treasures, some taken at at the Second Battle of Vienna when the Polish broke the Ottoman siege.

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The family lives in one building, while the main house has been preserved as a museum.

Unfortunately they were robbed several years ago and their greatest treasures were taken.

What makes the castle unique is that it’s intact, and it’s been continuously occupied since it was constructed.

If you go to the Royal Fortress at Loches, you’ll see some very impressive walls and the skeleton of the keep, but it’s just that. Four walls without a roof. And that’s true of a lot of their castles. They’re in various states of ruin.

If you’re looking for a castle, I would look for own that’s still occupied, and as well preserved as possible. Chambourg for example is huge, but empty. You just walk down these unfurnished corridors imaging what it once was.

Tours has a cool medieval core, with good food. Poiters also has a really nice core, but the suburbs are awful.

You’ll find the French countryside is often very empty. There has been a great shift from the countryside to the city, and so many of those beautiful country villages are ghost towns.

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Be aware the French have speed cameras everywhere. There are signs, but they will try and trick you if they can.

I don’t really understand how it works but the only Police you really need to watch are the national police. They have real power.

Was thinking of doing this driving trip and imagine that has now changed to doing it since I booked flights today for next September