France Family Travel Guide

Say bonjour when you walk in. Every shop. Every bakery. Every restaurant. Walking in silently and heading straight for the counter reads as rude here in a way it does not at home. Say merci when you leave. That is most of the etiquette lesson right there.

Learn five words, not fifty. Bonjour, merci, s’il vous plaît, pardon, au revoir. That is enough to be treated well everywhere.

Lunch is a real thing. Small town shops and kitchens close in the middle of the day and plenty of them do not reopen until seven. Plan around it or you will be eating gas station sandwiches.

Sunday is quiet. Most shops shut. Bakeries usually open in the morning and then close. Buy your food Saturday.

Tipping is not required. Service is included by law. Rounding up or leaving a euro or two for good service is normal. Twenty percent is not.

Kids at the table is normal. Nobody blinks at a child in a restaurant at eight at night. There is often no kids menu because there does not need to be one.

TGV between cities. Paris to Lyon about two hours. Paris to Bordeaux about two. Paris to Nice is long enough that flying or an overnight makes more sense. Book ahead, the price climbs hard close to the date.

The Metro with kids. Buy a carnet or load a Navigo. Strollers and stairs are a fight at older stations, so a carrier beats a stroller for a Paris day.

Rent the car outside the city. Pick it up at a suburban station or the airport, not in the center. Automatics cost more and sell out, so book early if nobody in your group drives manual.

Tolls are real money. The autoroutes are excellent and they are not free. Paris down to the south will run you a meaningful amount in péage on top of fuel. Budget for it.

Low emission zones. Bigger cities require a Crit’Air sticker on the windscreen. Rental cars usually have one. Check before you drive into Paris, Lyon or Grenoble.

You can see a lot of France by riverboat. The Seine runs out of Paris through Normandy to Rouen and Honfleur. The Rhone and the Saone run down through Lyon into Provence. You unpack once and the country comes past the window. I sell these and I will say it plainly. For a group with kids and grandparents in it, a river cruise is the easiest version of France there is. Start with how the river lines compare and what a week on AmaWaterways is actually like.

Euro, cards everywhere. Tap works on the Metro, in bakeries, at market stalls. Carry twenty or thirty in cash anyway for small village vendors and public toilets.

Schengen ninety in one eighty. Americans get ninety days inside any rolling one hundred and eighty across the whole Schengen area, not per country. If you are doing a long Europe run, France is where people accidentally burn the clock.

ETIAS is coming. A cheap online travel authorisation for visa exempt travelers is being phased in. Check the current status before you book, because the date has moved more than once.

What a day costs. Mid range for a family of four in Paris runs roughly three hundred to five hundred dollars a day all in. Outside Paris it drops fast. The Riviera runs higher, Monaco higher still, though walking around Monaco costs nothing.

The free Louvre day. First Sunday of the month, October through March. We went on it because we had no choice. It is still what I tell budget families to build the week around.

Pharmacies are the front line. Green cross out front. Pharmacists here handle a lot of what would be an urgent care visit at home, and they will tell you straight if you need a doctor.

Four to five days. Paris only. Two museum mornings maximum, the rest walking and eating. Add one day trip and leave it at that.

Seven to ten days. Paris plus one region. Normandy if you want coast and history, the Loire if you want castles with kids, Lyon if you want food.

Two weeks. Paris, one northern region, then the train south for Provence or the Riviera. Two bases, not five.

Three weeks or more. Now a car makes sense and you can do the version we did. Coast, countryside, Alps, Mediterranean, with days that are not planned.

Base, do not hop. Sleeping in one place for four nights and driving out from it beats four one night stops every single time, especially with kids.

Two things a day. One in the morning, one after lunch, and a long slow dinner. That is a full day in France. Anything more and somebody is crying, and it will not always be the nine year old.

Kids are welcome, not catered to. No kids menu, no crayons, no early bird seating. What you get instead is a table where nobody minds that your nine year old is there at eight at night. Order her a plate of the real food.

Feed them from the bakery. A croissant in the morning and a baguette at lunch solves ninety percent of the picky eater problem. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and it is good.

Museums in small doses. Ninety minutes at the Louvre with a target beats four hours of dragging. Pick three things each kid wants to find and turn it into a hunt.

Book an apartment with a kitchen. Grocery breakfasts and one cooked dinner a week is the difference between a France trip you can afford and one you cannot.

Car seats and rentals. Bring your own or reserve them explicitly. Rental company seats are expensive and not guaranteed to be there.

Bringing a dog. France is dog friendly to a degree Americans find startling. Dogs in restaurants, dogs on trains. EU pet passport rules apply, and it is a real process. We did it for Poppy going into Norway and it is worth starting months out.

Pickpockets, not danger. Paris is safe and Paris has skilled pickpockets. Crossbody bags, nothing in back pockets, extra attention at the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur and on the Metro.

The beaches are pebbles. Both coasts. Nice, Cannes, Dieppe. Bring water shoes and stop expecting sand.

Paris smells, in places. It is beautiful and it is also a big city, and some corners of it will hit you with a whiff you were not prepared for. Both things are true.

Wine is cheaper than water. That is not a figure of speech. A four euro bottle from a supermarket is good.

The Eiffel Tower has a sales floor around it. Keychains, selfie sticks, little metal towers, relentlessly. Every famous landmark loved for a hundred years ends up like this.

Bonjour changes everything. People who say the French were rude to them usually walked in silent. Two words fixes it.

Grocery stores are an attraction. I mean this sincerely. Go into a French supermarket and give yourself half an hour. It is one of the best free things you will do.

Paris. Five nights. The Eiffel Tower booked ahead, the Louvre for an hour not a day, a park with a carousel every afternoon, a boat on the Seine at night.

The Loire or Normandy. Two nights. Chateaux with mazes and gardens on the Loire, or Mont Saint Michel and the D Day beaches in Normandy. Both under two hours from Paris.

The south. Four nights. Nice for the sea, Provence for the villages and the markets, Annecy for the lake and the mountains. We did the coast in the camper and would do it again.