Paris
Paris - the city of lights and love. Full of culture, food, art, history, and beauty.
With both kids out of diapers and done with naps… we were feeling the itch to visit Europe again. Europe is like an addiction, once you go you can’t wait to go back!
Admittedly I wrote this blog to hopefully inspire more families to travel, but I do think there are a couple of sweet spots with kids where certain adventures might be easier. When kids are really young (and can take naps on the go) or if they’re pretty much done with naps, Europe can be great! But there’s probably a window between 1.5-3 years old that it might be better to wait until they no longer “need” naps every day to avoid nuclear explosions.
That in-between age I might recommend more mountain our beach vacations where it’s easy to take a break in the middle of the day and let them nap.
Logistics
When figuring out where we wanted to go in Europe we had to consider a few logistics:
Our daughter Averie was JUST starting to get done with naps when we went to Paris. (3.5 years old). But she was still the perfect age to be cool with a stroller. (p.s. check out my “Travel Must Haves” blog for the BEST travel stroller ever). So we wanted a place that would be fairly stroller friendly.
Our son Wyatt was 6 years old. Too old for a stroller, but also not quite old enough to walk ALL day long. Also both kids are still in need of car seats. So we knew we wanted to take advantage of public transportation, but also didn’t want to be tied to it…
TWO amazing things we did for travel logistics was to bring my son’s scooter and use travel car seat vests (check out the same “Travel Must Haves” blog for links).
These vests folded up perfectly under the stroller in case we needed to jump in a taxi.
*Side note with the scooter - some churches will have them listed on the CAN NOT BRING IN list right along side guns and knives (go figure). BUT Paris in particular is very scooter friendly (I was shocked at how many local kids were scootering around). Many next door restaurants will hold them for you (without charge or pressure to buy something).
Why Paris?
For us - as our first trip to Europe with the kids, we picked Paris for a few reasons:
We’d been before. This may seem like a backwards reason, but I knew for our first oversees adventure I’d be less stressed and more adaptable if I’d already been. If for some reason my child had a melt down and we couldn’t make it up in the Eiffel tower, I didn’t want to be crushed.
Easy to get to. The flights were actually very inexpensive! We flew LAX to ORLY non-stop for cheaper than the tickets were to St. Louis… I kid you not, we were planning the kids spring break and considered visiting family in St. Louis. Tickets were for some reason high. We randomly check flights to Europe… and found very inexpensive tickets on a site called French Bee. (More notes on this airline below).
We wanted good food, good wine, and something iconic that the kids could get excited about. We read books to the kids in advance of going, tried watching shows that featured Paris in the background. Tried to teach them words in French. The more excited you get the kids BEFORE you go, the more fun I think they’ll have when they get there.
It was close to something new. While I really wanted to make this as “stress-free” as possible, I also wanted to see something new. Paris is so close to many neighboring areas that are easy to get to. We ended up doing a night in Amboise and the whole family fell in love with it’s charm.
Travel - how to survive 100 hours (ok just 11) on a plane with kids
We ended up booking with a company called French Bee. The price was fantastic and I was a little worried I was signing up for the “Spirit airlines” of international travel (nothing wrong with Spirit, just didn’t want to be on one of their planes that long). But it was actually great. Highly recommend them!
Full honesty - when we booked these flights we did it somewhat on a whim.. “Let’s do this! we can do it! Look at the price of these flights. Let’s go!” Then about an hour after booking the flights I realized I was going to be on an 11 hour overnight flight with two kids.
Second confession - my daughter has a big heart, and is full big emotions that sometimes come out in a loud way… especially when she’s tired. So I tried to get creative with ways to make the kids more comfortable:
Neck pillows (how cute are these?!) and they came with eye masks.
Seat “extenders” (GREAT for keeping things from dropping on the floor… and very helpful for sleeping)
Bring a kids blanket… yes trust me the planes get cold and the more blankets the better so that you can stuff them on top of uncomfortable areas on the seats.
Bring different activities… you might think that they can watch the iPad the whole time… but even my kids needed a break. We love these mess free marker packs. (You don’t have to fill the markers with water, and they fit great in their back packs.)
SNACKS (duh)
Home away from home
Trust me - it’s well worth the money to find an AirBnB or VRBO with two bedrooms… Get those kids in a separate room. We decided to stay about a 10 min walk from Notre Dame. The area was great, more affordable, close to public transportation, and a tad more local which we thought was cool.
Here’s why it’s so important - those kids are going to be ZONKED at the end of the day. But if they’re like my kids, that means they’ll be WIRED and hyper and refuse to sleep. A separate room creates that separation from the living space and makes it 100x easier to get them to focus on sleep (vs if you do a pull out sofa in the living room).
Second - when they go down, you’re going to want that glass of wine (you’ve deserved it!) and if you’re like me, you’ll want to get things ready for the next day.
Few random pieces of advice:
Find a place near a supermarket - you will find that you want to make a few small trips. It’s inevitable.
Pay attention to the train station you’re closest to. Not all train stations are created equal. The Paris Metro is awesome, but some stations are off on their own lines and it ends up being faster to walk to a different station depending on where you’re trying to go.
Find a place near a coffee shop. These were some of our favorites!
Odette
Don’t bother doing laundry. We went for a week and I thought I’d pack light and do laundry… well either we’re idiots (possible) or the dryer’s there are just different and it took like 4 hours to do one load and it still didn’t come out dry.
Things to do for 6 days
When traveling, I really like to use the Wanderlog app to help me stay organized on places we want to go. It includes built in maps/directions and is super easy to change things around on the fly. It also offers a tool to help you “optimize” the route you’d take! I personally find it easier to cluster activities near each other.
When we booked our flight originally, we didn’t pay attention and found out later that the Marathon was the weekend we arrived… cool. After living in Chicago, we knew that during the Marathon streets would be closed and a ton of people would descend on the city, so we decided to get out!
This actually worked out great. We picked up a car from the airport, drove into the city (yep! drove in downtown Paris… eek!), and then drove out the next morning down to Amboise for one night. Amboise is an amazing town about 3 hours south of Paris. Yes we paid for two hotels for one night, but if you can swing it, it was worth it to leave half our luggage behind and also not go immediately when we arrived.
To be honest both of our kids were also still exhausted from the travel from the day before and so it was perfect for them to fall asleep with a midday nap on our drive down. If we had tried to do a full adventure day on Day 1… we might not have recovered. So here’s the advice with two young kids - make day one an easy going day.
For those interested in our itinerary, I bulleted it below!
Montmartre
Day 1 - Montmartre + drive
Morning - drove to Montmartre (really easy to find a parking garage at the base of the hill) for breakfast and the views.
Spent about 2 hours there, and then drove down to Amboise! (3 hour drive).
Day 2 - Amboise & Loire Valley
Amboise and the Loire Valley. Check out our blog on Amboise for more details! Left around 2pm to drive back to Paris.
Sainte Chapelle
Day 3 - Latin Quarter/Notre Dame
Natural History Museum
Sainte Chapelle (my FAVORITE and a MUST in my opinion) - get a reservation!
Notre Dame area (heart breaking after the fire - but they do a wonderful job showing how they are rebuilding)
National Museum of Natural History (my son’s one request was to see dinosaur bones… so I discovered this museum and it was small but amazing!)
Luxembourg Gardens. Great for the kids to run around and chase pigeons.
Latin Quarter - for dinner
Luxembourg Gardens
Day 4 - Eiffel Tower/ Arc de Triomphe (Hop on - Hop off bus!)
Family photos early in the morning! - We’ve done this a few times when we travel and it’s 100% worth it. Such a great way to have nice family photos. I love to use Flytographer.com
Eiffel Tower (Get the skip the line reservations!)
Hop on - Hop off bus tour (both took care of transportation and gave a great view of the city)
Arc de Triomphe
Champs-Elysees
Galeries Lafayette Haussmann
Disneyland Paris
Day 5 - Disney Paris!
45 minutes outside of the city and VERY easy to get to. Just take the train to Marne-la-Vallée Chessy.
The kids loved going to Disney (so did the adults!). But I was somewhat disappointed it was almost just like the Disneyland in Anahiem, CA. If you have access to Disneyland in the states, I’d say it wasn’t worth spending one of our France trip days.
One other word of warning - it is VERY unorganized at the entrance… but once you get through it was typical to what you’d expect of any Disney park.
Kids 2 and under are free!
Day 6 - Museums and Gardens
Pyramids out from of the Louvre Museum (we didn’t actually go in… we decided to “pick one” when it came to art museums and went with Musee d’Orsay. But the pyramids were iconic and so we went there early to take a picture in front.)
Pont des Arts
Musee d’Orsay (kid you not, we spent 4 hours here…! We did a scavenger hunt that the kids LOVED)
Tuileries Garden
Boat ride along the Seine
