The trains in Europe are great. However, they don’t serve some of the smallest towns in France. To visit those, you’ll need to rent a car. We’ve rented cars to travel around Europe twice, and here is our collective wisdom:
Rent the smallest model that will fit you, your traveling companions, and your luggage. If necessary, downsize your luggage to fit a smaller car. Our Peugeot 308 just barely fit on a one-lane bridge, and we needed to worry about its size for parking spaces.
Most rental cars in Europe are manual transmission. You can find automatic transmission cars, but prepare to pay more to rent them.
Rent a diesel car. The mileage is better, and diesel or gasoil is cheaper than gasoline in Europe.
Download a map application for your cell phone that can work offline. This will be helpful in the hinterlands, and will reduce your need for excess data plan for your cell phone. Those megabytes add up fast.
Learn to think in metric. Distances are in kilometers instead of miles, and fuel is sold in liters rather than gallons. One kilometer (km) is 0.6 miles, so 10 km is about 6 miles. One gallon is 3.8 liters. So if you buy gas at 1.40 Euros per liter, that’s 5.32 Euros per gallon. A 50-liter tank of gas (just over 13 gallons) will set you back 70 Euros. Consider the cost of gas carefully when you think about renting a car.
Also consider the cost of tolls. France’s autoroutes are highly tolled. The drive from Montpellier to Lyon (about 300 km/180 miles) set us back over 20 Euros.
Although renting a car in Europe is not cheap, it will allow you more flexibility in your travel times and destinations. It also gets you away from the tourist traps and into the countryside.
Jun 15
Words from the Wiseacres
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2 comments
Some friends of ours have made several barge/bicycle vacations. Sounds lovely. Many years ago my then husband and I rented a VW camper for 3 weeks. I wish I had planned out a better itinerary. I wish I had gone with someone else too!
Car?!? How about a bicycle? 🙂
– No trouble with narrow bridges.
– Cycle paths are prettier than roads.
– No expensive gas to buy.
– You get your exercise.
– You’ll spend even more time in the hinterlands.
– You see more, going by at a slower speed.
– And one thing I remarked on recently when we were in southern France and rented bikes for a day to see the Camargue: the people who went there by car totally missed out on hearing the sound of all the variety of birds, which was lovely. Sometimes, there are the smells of wildflowers or freshly-mown hay fields, etc.