Car rental in Cambridge runs through the branch network, not an airport: the major brands operate offices around the city's ring - station-area and business-park locations doing the work - since Cambridge's own airfield serves business aviation rather than scheduled flights, and Stansted, forty minutes south down the M11, carries the region's real airport desks. The honest Cambridge advice mirrors the city's character: you do not want a car in the centre, where colleges, cyclists and permit zones rule - collect wheels only for the escape days. Those escapes justify it: Ely's cathedral rising from the fens twenty minutes north, the Imperial War Museum's airfield at Duxford ten minutes south, Newmarket's racing heath east, and the Suffolk wool villages - Lavenham, Clare - within the hour. Book branch hours carefully; suburban offices keep shorter weekends than airports.
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