Map: Top Destinations in France
Traveling as a Temporary Local
France is a big country by European standards—and would be one of the biggest states if it ever joined the US (unlikely). Geographically, it’s a bit smaller than Texas, but has 66 million people (Texas has 26 million) and over 400 different cheeses (Texas has...not that many). Diversité is a French forte. This country features three mountain ranges (the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Massif Central), two coastlines as different as night and day (Atlantic and Mediterranean), cosmopolitan cities (such as Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Nice), and countless sleepy villages. From the Swiss-like Alps to the molto Italian Riviera, and from the Spanish Pyrenees to das German Alsace, you can stay in France and feel like you’ve sampled much of Europe—and never be more than a short stroll from a bon vin rouge.
This book covers the predictable must-sees while mixing in a healthy dose of Back Door intimacy. Along with seeing the Eiffel Tower, Mont St-Michel, and the French Riviera, you’ll take a minivan tour of the D-Day beaches, pedal your way from village to vineyard in the Alsace, marvel at 15,000-year-old cave paintings, and paddle a canoe down the lazy Dordogne River. You’ll find a magnifique hill-town perch to catch a Provençal sunset, ride Europe’s highest mountain lift over the Alps, and touch the quiet Romanesque soul of Burgundian abbeys and villages. You’ll learn about each region’s key monuments and cities with thoughtfully presented walking tours and background information. Just as important, you’ll meet the intriguing people who run your hotel, bed-and-breakfast, or restaurant. We’ve also listed our favorite local guides, all well worth the time and money, to help you gain a better understanding of this marvelous country’s past and present.
The destinations covered in this book are balanced to include the most interesting cities and intimate villages, from jet-setting beach resorts to the traditional heartland. This book is selective, including only the most exciting sights and romantic villages—for example, there are hundreds of beautiful châteaux in the Loire region, but we cover only the top 12. And though there are dozens of Loire towns you could use for a home base, we recommend the best two.
Use this legend to help you navigate the maps in this book.
The best is, of course, only our opinion. But after spending much of our adult lives writing and lecturing about travel, guiding tours, and gaining an appreciation for all things French, we’ve developed a sixth sense for what touches the traveler’s imagination.
Rick Steves France 2016 is a personal tour guide in your pocket. Better yet, it’s actually two tour guides in your pocket: The co-author of this book is Steve Smith. Steve, who has lived in France on several occasions, now travels there annually (as he has since 1986) as a guide, researcher, and devout Francophile. He restored a 300-year-old farmhouse in Burgundy (where he bases himself while updating this book) and today keeps one foot on each side of the Atlantic. Together, Steve and I keep this book current (though, for simplicity, from this point “we” will shed our respective egos and become “I”).
This book is organized by destinations. Each is a minivacation on its own, filled with exciting sights, strollable neighborhoods, affordable places to stay, and memorable places to eat. In the following chapters, you’ll find these sections:
Planning Your Time suggests a schedule for how to best use your limited time.
Orientation has specifics on public transportation, helpful hints, local tour options, easy-to-read maps, and tourist information.
Sights describes the top attractions and includes their cost and hours.
Self-Guided Walks take you through interesting neighborhoods and villages, pointing out sights and local flavor.
Sleeping describes my favorite hotels, from good-value deals to cushy splurges.
Eating serves up a buffet of options, from inexpensive cafés to intimate restaurants.
Connections outlines your options for traveling to destinations by train, bus, and plane. In car-friendly regions, I’ve included route tips for drivers.
France: Past and Present gives you a quick overview of French history, notable citizens, and current political issues.
Practicalities is a traveler’s tool kit, with my best tips about money, sightseeing, sleeping, eating, staying connected, and transportation (trains, buses, car rentals, driving, and flights).
The appendix has the nuts-and-bolts: useful phone numbers and websites, a holiday and festival list, recommended books and films, a climate chart, a handy packing checklist, a pronunciation guide for place names, and French survival phrases.
Browse through this book, choose your favorite destinations, and link them up. Then have a très bon voyage! Traveling like a temporary local, you’ll get the absolute most out of every mile, minute, and dollar. And, as you visit places I know and love, I’m happy that you’ll be meeting some of my favorite French people.
This section will help you get started planning your trip—with advice on trip costs, when to go, and what you should know before you take off.
There’s no point in hauling around a big chapter on Normandy for a day in Provence. That’s why I hope you’ll rip this book apart. Before your trip, attack this book with a utility knife to create an army of pocket-sized mini guidebooks—one for each area you visit.
I love the ritual of trimming down the size of guidebooks I’ll be using: Fold the pages back until you break the spine, neatly slice apart the sections you want with a utility knife, then pull them out with the gummy edge intact. If you want, finish each one off with some clear, heavy-duty packing tape to smooth and reinforce the spine, and/or use a heavy-duty stapler along the edge to prevent the first and last pages from coming loose.
To make things even easier, I’ve created a line of laminated covers with slide-on binders (available at www.ricksteves.com). With every stop, you can make a ritual of swapping out the last chapter with the new one.
As you travel, throw out the chapters you’re done with (or, much better, give them to a needy fellow traveler). While you may be tempted to keep this book intact as a souvenir of your travels, you’ll appreciate even more the footloose freedom of traveling light.
Your trip to France is like a complex play—it’s easier to follow and really appreciate on a second viewing. While no one does the same trip twice to gain that advantage, reading this book in its entirety before your trip accomplishes much the same thing.
Design an itinerary that enables you to visit sights at the best possible times. Note festivals, holidays, market days, specifics on sights, and days when sights are closed or most crowded (all covered in this book). To connect the dots smoothly, read the tips in Practicalities on taking trains and buses, or renting a car and driving. Designing a smart trip is a fun, doable, and worthwhile challenge.
Make your itinerary a mix of intense and relaxed stretches. To maximize rootedness, minimize one-night stands. It’s worth taking a long drive after dinner (or a train ride with a dinner picnic) to get settled in a town for two nights. Every trip—and every traveler—needs slack time (laundry, picnics, people-watching, and so on). Pace yourself. Assume you will return.
Reread this book as you travel, and visit local tourist information offices (abbreviated as TI in this book). Upon arrival in a new town, lay the groundwork for a smooth departure; confirm the train, bus, or road you’ll take when you leave.
Even with the best-planned itinerary, you’ll need to be flexible. Update your plans as you travel. Though I encourage you to disconnect from life back home and immerse yourself in the French experience, you can get online or call ahead to double-check tourist information, learn the latest on sights (special events, tour schedules, and so on), book tickets and tours, make reservations, reconfirm hotels, and research transportation connections.
Enjoy the friendliness of the French people. Connect with the culture. Learn a new French expression each day and practice it. Cheer for your favorite bowler at a boules match, leave no chair unturned in your quest for the best café, find that perfect hill-town view, and make friends with a waiter (it can happen). Most importantly, slow down and be open to unexpected experiences. Ask questions—most locals are eager to point you in their idea of the right direction. Keep a notepad in your pocket for noting directions, organizing your thoughts, and confirming prices. Wear your money belt, learn the currency, and figure out how to estimate prices in dollars. Those who expect to travel smart, do.
While this trip is doable in 22 days, most will appreciate adding an extra day here and there to rest their engine.
Five components make up your trip costs: airfare, surface transportation, room and board, sightseeing and entertainment, and shopping and miscellany.
Airfare: Paris and Nice have the most convenient flights from the US. A basic round-trip flight from the US to Paris or Nice can cost, on average, about $1,000-2,000 total, depending on where you fly from and when (cheaper in winter). Consider saving time and money in Europe by flying into one city and out of another; for instance, into Nice and out of Paris. Most find the easygoing Mediterranean city of Nice far easier than Paris as a starting point for their trip. Overall, Kayak.com is the best place to start searching for flights on a combination of mainstream and budget carriers.
Surface Transportation: For a three-week whirlwind trip of my recommended destinations by public transportation, allow $800 per person. If you’ll be renting a car, allow at least $230 per week, not including tolls, gas, and supplemental insurance. If you’ll be keeping the car for three weeks or more, look into leasing, which can save you money on insurance and taxes for trips of this length. Car rentals (if four days or longer) and leases are cheapest if arranged from the US.
Buying train tickets as you go can be fine for short rides but expensive for long ones. To save money, you must plan ahead, either by buying a train pass and making seat reservations (passes normally must be purchased outside of Europe) or by locking in reserved tickets with advance-purchase discounts. Don’t hesitate to consider flying, as budget airlines are often cheaper than taking the train (check www.skyscanner.com for intra-European flights). Inexpensive flights can get you between Paris and other major cities (such as Nice, Marseille, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Lyon, and Bordeaux). For more on public transportation and car rental, see “Transportation” in Practicalities.
Room and Board: Outside of Paris, you can thrive in France in 2016 on $145 a day per person for room and board. This allows $15 for breakfast, $15 for lunch, $45 for dinner with drinks, and $70 for lodging (based on two people splitting the cost of a $140 double room). Allow 30 percent more for your days in Paris. Students and tightwads can enjoy France for as little as $60 a day ($30 for a bed, $30 for meals and snacks).
Sightseeing and Entertainment: Figure about $10-15 per major sight (Louvre-$13, Abbey of Mont St-Michel-$10), $7 for minor ones (climbing church towers), $20 for guided walks, and $35 for bus tours and splurge experiences (concerts in Paris’ Sainte-Chapelle or a ride on the Chamonix gondola). An overall average of $30 a day works for most people. Don’t skimp here. After all, this category is the driving force behind your trip—you came to sightsee, enjoy, and experience France.
Shopping and Miscellany: Figure $4 per ice-cream cone, coffee, or soft drink. Shopping can vary in cost from nearly nothing to a small fortune. Good budget travelers find that this category has little to do with assembling a trip full of lifelong memories.
So much to see, so little time. How to choose? Depending on the length of your trip, and taking geographic proximity into account, here are my recommended priorities:
| 3 days: | Paris, maybe Versailles |
| 6 days, add: | Normandy |
| 8 days, add: | Loire |
| 11 days, add: | Dordogne, Carcassonne |
| 16 days, add: | Provence, Riviera |
| 19 days, add: | Burgundy, Chamonix |
| 22 days, add: | Alsace, northern France |
This includes nearly everything on the map on here. If you don’t have time to see it all, prioritize according to your interests. The “France At a Glance” sidebar can help you decide where to go (here).
For day-by-day itineraries for a three-week trip, see the sidebars (one for drivers and one for people using trains and buses) in this chapter. Note that a car is especially handy for exploring Normandy, the Dordogne, and Provence.
If you have only a week and it’s your first trip to France, do Paris, Normandy, and the Loire. For a 10- to 14-day trip that highlights Paris, Provence, and the Riviera, fly into Paris and out of Nice. After touring Paris, take the TGV train to Avignon, rent a car there, and drop it in Nice (or use trains, buses, and minivan tours to get around). This trip also works well in reverse. Travelers with a little more time could add Burgundy and/or the Alps, which are about halfway between Paris and Provence and easy to explore by car or train.
Late spring and fall are best, with generally good weather and lighter crowds, though summer brings festivals, animated villages, reliable weather, and long opening hours at sights.
Europeans vacation in July and August, jamming the Riviera, the coast of Brittany, the Dordogne, and the Alps (worst from mid-July to mid-August), but leaving the rest of the country just lively enough for tourists. And though many French businesses close in August, the traveler hardly notices. May weekends can be busy—many French holidays fall in this month—but June is generally quiet (outside of Paris).
Winter travel is fine for Paris, Nice, and Lyon, but you’ll find smaller cities and villages buttoned up tight. Winter weather is gray, noticeably milder in the south (unless the wind is blowing), and colder and wetter in the north. Snow is generally not an issue except in the mountains. Sights and tourist information offices keep shorter hours, and some tourist activities (such as English-language castle tours) vanish altogether. On the other hand, winter travel allows you to see cities through the lens of a local, as hotels, restaurants, and sights are much calmer. See the climate chart in the appendix for an idea of what to expect from the weather.
Thanks to France’s relatively mild climate, fields of flowers greet the traveler much of the year:
Mid-April-May: Crops of brilliant yellow colza bloom, mostly in the north (best in Burgundy). Wild red poppies (coquelicots) begin sprouting in the south.
June: Red poppies pop up throughout the country. Late in June, lavender blooms begin covering the hills of Provence.
My free Rick Steves Audio Europe app is a great tool for enjoying Europe. This app makes it easy to download my audio tours of top attractions, plus hours of travel interviews, all organized into destination-specific playlists.
My self-guided audio tours of major sights and neighborhoods are free, user-friendly, fun, and informative. Among the sights in this book, these audio tours include the major sights and neighborhoods in and near Paris (Historic Paris Walk, The Louvre, The Orsay, and Versailles Palace). Sights covered by my audio tours are marked with this symbol: 
. You can choose whether to follow the written tour in this book, or pop in your headphones and listen to essentially the same information—freeing up your eyes to appreciate the sights. These audio tours are hard to beat: Nobody will stand you up, the quality is reliable, you can take the tour exactly when you like, and the price is right.
The Rick Steves Audio Europe app also offers a far-reaching library of insightful travel interviews from my public radio show with experts from around the globe—including many of the places in this book.
This app and all of its content are entirely free. You can download Rick Steves Audio Europe via Apple’s App Store, Google Play, or the Amazon Appstore. For more information, see www.ricksteves.com/audioeurope.
July: Lavender is in full swing in Provence, and sunflowers are awakening. Cities, towns, and villages everywhere overflow with carefully tended flowers.
August-September: Sunflowers flourish north and south.
October: In the latter half of the month, the countryside glistens with fall colors, as most trees are deciduous. Vineyards go for the gold.
Check this list of things to arrange while you’re still at home.
You need a passport—but no visa or shots—to travel in France. You may be denied entry into certain European countries if your passport is due to expire within three months of your ticketed date of return. Get it renewed if you’ll be cutting it close. It can take up to six weeks to get or renew a passport (for more on passports, see www.travel.state.gov). Pack a photocopy of your passport in your luggage in case the original is lost or stolen.
Book rooms well in advance if you’ll be traveling during peak season (spring through fall) or any major holidays (see here).
Were your travels fun, smooth, and meaningful? If you’d like to share your tips, concerns, and discoveries, please fill out the survey at www.ricksteves.com/feedback. To check out readers’ hotel and restaurant reviews—or leave one yourself—visit my travel forum at www.ricksteves.com/travel-forum. I value your feedback. Thanks in advance.
Call your debit- and credit-card companies to let them know the countries you’ll be visiting, to ask about fees, request your PIN code (it will be mailed to you), and more. See here for details.
Do your homework if you want to buy travel insurance. Compare the cost of the insurance to the cost of your potential loss. Also, check whether your existing insurance (health, homeowners, or renters) covers you and your possessions overseas. For more tips, see www.ricksteves.com/insurance.
Consider buying a rail pass after researching your options (see here and www.ricksteves.com/rail for all the specifics).
All high-speed TGV trains in France require a seat reservation—book as early as possible, as they fill fast, and some routes use TGV trains almost exclusively. This is especially true if you’re traveling with a rail pass, as TGV passholder reservations are limited, and usually sell out well before other seat reservations. If you’re taking an overnight train, and you need a couchette (overnight bunk)—and you must leave on a certain day—consider booking it in advance through a US agent (such as www.raileurope.com). For more on train travel, see the Practicalities chapter.
To avoid long ticket-buying lines at the Eiffel Tower, book an entry time several months in advance using its online reservation system (see here). Some prehistoric caves in the Dordogne region take online reservations; see here. If the greatest cave, Font-de-Gaume, is accepting reservations in 2016, cross your fingers and book as far ahead as possible. A few sights, such as Avignon’s synagogue and some wineries, require that you make an appointment and are noted throughout this book.
If you plan to hire a local guide, reserve ahead by email. Popular guides can get booked up. If you want a specific guide, reserve as far ahead as possible (especially important for Paris, D-Day beaches, Burgundy’s wine country, and Provence).
If you’re bringing a mobile device, consider signing up for an international plan for cheaper calls, texts, and data (see here). Download any apps you might want to use on the road, such as translators, maps, transit schedules, and Rick Steves Audio Europe (see here).
We travel all the way to France to enjoy differences—to become temporary locals. You’ll experience frustrations. Certain truths that we find “God-given” or “self-evident,” such as cold beer, ice in drinks, bottomless cups of coffee, “the customer is king,” and bigger being better, are suddenly not so true. One of the benefits of travel is the eye-opening realization that there are logical, civil, and even better alternatives.
With a long history rich in human achievement, France is an understandably proud country. To appreciate its people, you need to celebrate the differences. A willingness to go local ensures that you’ll enjoy a full dose of French hospitality.
Europeans generally like Americans. But if there is a negative aspect to the French image of Americans, it’s that we are loud, wasteful, ethnocentric, too informal (which can seem disrespectful), and a bit naive.
The French (and Europeans in general) place a high value on speaking quietly in restaurants and on trains. Listen while on the bus or in a restaurant—the place can be packed, but the decibel level is low. Try to adjust your volume accordingly to show respect for the culture.
While the French look bemusedly at some of our Yankee excesses—and worriedly at others—they nearly always afford us individual travelers all the warmth we deserve.
Judging from all the happy feedback I receive from travelers who have used this book, it’s safe to assume you’ll enjoy a great, affordable vacation—with the finesse of an independent, experienced traveler.
Thanks, and bon voyage!
Rick Steves Audio Europe