Flying to France
Totem Moto Tours take care of you as soon as you land in the country. We do not book flights to or from France, for flexibility reasons. Nevertheless, here’s some basic information we would like to share with you.
Paris CDG Airport is our main hub. It is a sizable airport with 3 terminals, located northwest of Paris. There’s an airport shuttle for easy connections between terminals and a train station in Terminal 2 - however, you do need to do a lot of walking inside the terminals.
Travel tip: The train station in Terminal 2, located between terminals 2C/2D and terminals 2E/2F, is the starting point for long-distance trains (the famous TGVs) as well as commuter trains to Paris (called RERs). To navigate between terminals, you may have to use the subway-looking airport shuttle, called the CDGVAL, or a bus shuttle. Both are free and run frequently.
Entering the country by road
Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, entering France from its neighboring countries by road is very easy, since the border checkpoints and customs are long gone. Most of the time, if it wasn’t for the sign on the side of the road, you wouldn’t even notice you crossed a border.
Travelling by train
France is proud of its public-transport network, operated by the state-owned Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, aka SNCF. The trains are quick and comfortable and the timetables mostly reliable. The network, which offers extensive coverage of the country and frequent departures, renders rail travel faster and easier than flying. This is especially true for connections operated by the famous TGV, which stands for Train à Grande Vitesse (high-speed train). The conventional TGVs can go up to 200 mph, reaching average start-to-stop speeds of 170 mph on certain lines.
Travel Tip: Transportation from and to your arrival airport is included in your Totem Moto guided tour and all the required bookings will be made for you before your arrival.
From Paris CDG train station (or downtown Paris Montparnasse train station, for those who felt like spending a few days in the City of Light before jumping on the bike), a quick 2-hour TGV ride (or an even shorter 1-hour ride, if you leave from downtown Paris) will take you to the centrally-located Saint-Pierre-des-Corps train station. From here, a private bus shuttle will take you to your first-night’s accommodation.
The same goes for the trip between your last-night’s accommodation and the airport: everything’s taken care of by Totem Moto Tours and all your tickets and vouchers are given to you in advance.
Wing and sky picture by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash