Originally Posted by Sweet Willie
As our trip was very last minute and we were not able to do research on lodging, we stayed at the Holiday Inn in Caen. Very clean, cheap, easy location to get in/out of Caen and onto the countryside and D-Day sites.
The Ibis chain is a good, cheap, basic stay in most French cities. It is the basic accommodation brand for the Mercure chain. In fact, in Caen, the Mercure and Ibis are connected.
Caen is a great place to start/end your Normandy trip if you prefer not to drive all the way from Paris/elsewhere. You can take the train to Caen and rent a car from there; it's so much easier than navigating through Paris.
While in Normandy, I had a delightful stay in Sainte Mere Eglise, the first town to be liberated by the allied forces. We stayed in a little motel on the edge of town near the motorway, but we had an excellent dinner at the John Steel Hotel...wish we found the place earlier so we could try staying there instead. The Airborne Museum is also a great stop while in the town:
http://www.airborne-museum.org/ang/index.htm