So You Want To Visit France…

You’ve decided it’s finally time to see Paris, and perhaps more of France, too. How do you set about getting there? If you’re the kind of traveler who likes spontaneity, you get on a plane and worry about where to stay, where to eat, what to do, where and how to go—when you get there. This article is not for you. But if you’re an organized traveler who wants to have things worked out in advance and know where you will lay your head each and every night, read on. First of all, you need to know the dates of your projected trip. Then you must decide where you want to go: Paris only, Provence only, a little of both…or perhaps just the area of the Ile de France. Let’s assume you have two weeks and want to see Paris and one or more other regions of la belle France. Paris itself offers more than you could possibly take in over several months, but for a first visit a week at least gets you started. That leaves about a week for other areas. At this point you need a good guidebook—I strongly recommend the Michelin green guide to France—and the Michelin map of France, the one with the red cover. For additional research, several other guides are very useful. The Cadogan guides provide a wealth of information on each region covered and are especially strong on history, while the Fodor and Frommer guides concentrate more on sightseeing high points, hotels, and restaurants. Worth their weight in gold—if you can find a used copy—are the Birnbaum’s guide to France and the wonderful Fisher guide written by Georgia Hesse, both now sadly out of print. Once you have dipped into these guides, think about the things that especially interest you: history, cultural activities, churches, open-air markets? If it’s history, does any particular era fascinate you—perhaps the days when imperial Rome ruled part of France? If that period attracts you, you would surely want to see Vienne, Vaison-la-Romaine, Orange, Nimes, and Arles. If cultural activities beckon to you, there are major festivals at Orange and Avignon, with opera and theater. If charming hill-top villages call to you, you will find them in considerable numbers in the Luberon, the area around St.-Rémy, and the hills surrounding Nice. Gourmets would find the city of Lyon especially attractive, with its multitude of excellent restaurants and a famous food market frequented by the top chefs of the region. Open-air markets abound throughout France, offering dedicated shoppers wonderful possibilities. If ecclesiastic architecture appeals to you, you would certainly want to visit some of the great cathedrals of France: Rheims, Chârtres, Troyes, Vézelay, Autun. Oenophiles will not want to miss the regions of Burgundy, the Côte-du-Rhone, and Bordeaux, with perhaps a dip into the Champagne region. Devotees of the fine arts might want to visit the sites where the Impressionists worked and the museums where their work is displayed; the south of France is particularly rich in these. Of course, if your idea of a vacation is taking life easy, there is the entire Côte d’Azur at your disposal for lying in the sun and watching the world go by. Once you have begun to settle on the sights and sites you want to see, start calculating the distances from one to another to get an idea of how much ground you can cover in the time available. You might want to plan your trip around areas served by the TGV (trains à grand vitesse, or high-speed trains), which are France’s offering to civilized travel. These nifty iron horses can get you all the way from Paris to the Mediterranean in about 2-1/2 hours, saving you a good deal of time that can be spent on seeing things other than a road. If you prefer car travel, keep in mind that the high-speed autoroutes get you from here to there much faster than do the routes nationales (non-freeway links among major cities and towns) and the smaller side roads. Still, driving from Paris to Marseille takes up the major portion of one day, but it can be done without pushing you to the brink of exhaustion if you stop several times on the way. However, if the places you want to see on a first trip are within an hour or two of Paris, you could spend a week happily circumnavigating the capital and seeing Versailles and Fontainebleau, Chârtres cathedral and its medieval town, a sampling of the Loire Valley châteaux, the towns of Angers and Tours…just dip into the Michelin green guide to the Ile de France and you will find suggestions for touring and useful itineraries from which to choose. When you have selected the general region for your visit, get a copy of the Michelin map for that area; you will need information on a smaller scale than is shown on the map of France as a whole. That will also be a good time to see what the Internet has to offer—a Google search will bring up websites that can be especially helpful, particularly for large cities. Smaller towns usually have at least a link to their tourist offices, and some offer much more. Checking web sites well in advance of your trip will ensure that you have up-to-date information so that you don’t arrive at some sight you particularly want to see only to find that it is closed on Mondays and all you can do is peek in through the gate. In that regard, be sure look up the dates of French holidays: there are a LOT of holidays, and often they expand to the days before and after as well. After you’ve decided where you want to go and what you want to see, you will need to decide how much ground you can cover in a day and thus where you will be when night begins to fall. Having a bed waiting at the end of the day is a great comfort when fatigue sets in, and France is full of charming hotels and inns, most at prices better than what you might expect. To find these gems you will need yet another guidebook, and the grandpère (or grandmère) of them all is the red Michelin Guide to France. Most of it is in French, but don’t despair: there are English sections at the beginning that give you a…