Airbnb with a view
The Schedule
Taking the kids to Paris sounds daunting but can be the adventure of their young lives with a little planning. To give you a starting point, here is the itinerary we followed and some things we learned along the way.
When planning your itinerary , there are several things to keep in mind, but maybe the place to start is knowing the days tha major attractions are open so you can build the initial framework of your trip. Each of the major museums takes a day off each week, and, while a lot of establishments may close on Sunday, many also (or alternately) close on Monday or Tuesday. If you’re lucky enough to be there on the first Sunday of the month, many are FREE!
Closed Monday: Musée D’Orsay, Versailles, Musée Rodin, Musée Carnavalet, Catacombs of Paris
Closed Tuesday: Louvre, Musée de l’Orangerie, Pompidou Centre
This is how we did it:
Day One
– arrived and checked into our Airbnb
– walked to and climbed the Arc De Triomphe
– a walk along the Champs Élysée and a sweet snack at La Durée
-Paris Saint-Germain FC soccer game
-dinner at a café near the Airbnb
Day Two
-Louvre (tickets need to be scheduled ahead of time)
– a walk through the Jardin des Tuileries
– quick stop for the best Madeilines in town at the nearby: Mado a Paris
– wandered and shopped through the 7th arrondissement
-sunset at the Galleries Lafayette for the rooftop views
– dinner nearby (see a theme? There are cafés EVERYWHERE! Just wander in.)
Day Three
-Musée D’Orsay
-Reserved lunch at Madame Brasserie in Eiffel (more on tickets to the Eiffel Tower below)
-Photoshoot at Avenue de Camoens and alone the Seine with a local photographer
– wandered through the 6th arrondissment and stopped for a café dinner
-Luxembourg Gardens (the kids loved the carousel, playground and the Statue of Liberty scavenger hunt)
Day Four
-Versailles guided tour (half day) with Pablo
-walk around Île de la Cité
–Sainte-Chapelle
-Notre Dame (has a construction museum about the restoration as it wasn’t finished yet)
-walked around Latin District (including Shakespeare and Co) and the 4th arrondissement
UPDATE: We recently returned as part of Spring Break 2024 before headed to Rome. Two added days included:
Day Five
– Lunch at Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon train station
– take the Metro to the Jardin des Tuileries and do a quick carousel ride
– Musee de l’Orangerie
– Return visit for Madelines and tea at Mado a Paris
– walk back home to our Airbnb in le Marais
– Supermarket local grabs for a picnic dinner at home (see our post about fun grocery finds to try)
Day Six
– pastries in the Square du Temple Elie Wiesel
– The Catacombs (more on this below)
-Île Saint-Louis (the island adjacent to the Île de la Cité where Notre Dame and Sainte-Chappelle reside) for shopping with ice cream and fries stop at La Chaumiere
-Pablo Picasso Museum Musée National Picasso-Paris (delightfully empty during March)
– Dinner in le Marais in the oldest food market in Paris at Marche de Rouge Enfants
The Eiffel Tower
Tickets to go to the summit open at midnight (Paris time) 90 days in advance and are often hard to get. We weren’t lucky enough to score them, and, not wanting to pay an arm and leg for another service that also gets you to the top, we took an alternate approach and booked lunch in the Brasserie on the 1st floor. Lunch at Madame Brasserie gains you entrance to the first floor via lift, along with a delicious three-course lunch INSIDE the tower and access to climb up or down from there.
If you’re sans kids, Le Jules Verne, a Michelin-starred restaurant on the second floor of Eiffel Tower, is another option with exquisite food and wine and amazing views of the city. To be fair we did see some kids here, you just won’t find mine here.
The Catacombs / Les Catacombes des Paris
My kids were very excited to see this. We missed our chance the first time so when we returned a second time it was a must. Firstly, I don’t recommend this is you’re at all claustrophobic. The kids became quickly anxious once we entered not because of any skeletons, as you don’t find them til much later, but because of the dark, long, low ceilinged tunnel many levels underground below Paris you have to have traverse before even getting to the crypts. Once in the crypts the ceilings open up quite a bit and everyone was actually fine then, ironically in the rooms with walls of human bones. Hundreds of years of Parisian remains were indeed intriguing to see all in all. Tickets for this open 1 week in advance and are recommended as these book up quickly as well. You can book these through an outside service but the prices are usually much higher.
Versailles
You can take a train or taxi or book a private transfer and tour, which is what we ultimately did. With concern over public transport shutdowns because of the strikes, we were happy we did. We booked a tour with a guide via Airbnb Experiences with Pablo who picked us up in Mercedes vans at the Place de la Concorde, drove us to Versailles, obtained our tickets, and toured the grounds with us. He was amazing with the kids, helping them understand the history. Each kid was assigned a role in the history, and they loved hearing who killed whom and who was later beheaded.
French Food
We were pretty stressed out the first time around thinking we needed reservations for all of our meals. We didn’t want to miss the major tourist dining spots. When traveling with kids, we find a more “go with flow” attitude makes for a less stressful trip. We’re not rushing off to make a certain reservation at a certain time. There is amazing food EVERYWHERE. See a cafe that looks nice? Just walk in. We’ve both gone to nicer restaurants to try something new and then we’ve also let the kids just have their 8th croissant of the trip for that meal. It’s about everyone enjoying themselves and for this time I quit worrying about veggie intake and everyone indulging in what they love about French fare.
There are treats on every block so we used these as motivation for get from here to there or another 10 minutes in a museum we’re enjoying. We’re not above a little bribery so every wins. Pain au chocolat, macaron, hot chocolate, oh my!
Grocery store dinner night is a fun experience at a low cost and easy when energy levels are low, such as the first day of arrival. Walk into any nearby market such as a Franprix and everyone picks out things we can’t get at home. We enjoyed new pastries, yogurts, odd chip flavors, new candies but also snuck in some fresh produce and very affordable, but amazing bottles of wine for the parents to enjoy after the kids crashed.
Supermarché grabs
Other highly recommended experienced that were done without the kids previously but could certainly be kid friendly:
–CV2 Citroen tour around the city and to Sacré Couer/ Montmartre whilst sipping champagne (larger car available for bigger parties)
–Paris By Mouth tour and bar hopping in Marais or Latin District
The Housing
Hotels big enough for families are expensive and rare. Most standard rooms will fit 2-3 and, unlike the US, you can’t just sneak another kid in. They are much more strict on that. So this led us to our tried and true Airbnb. I always look for hosts labeled as “Superhosts” with tons of positive reviews for peace of mind. Reading the reviews allows you to learn so much about each host and pick one that suits you best. Not only were these much more affordable than a hotel, but they can be multi-roomed, including kitchens and, our personal biggest demand, a washer and dryer.
For our first trip with the kids, we wanted to stay as centrally-located as possible. Paris is broken up into districts or arrondissements, and most of the main touristy sites are around the 7th and 8th arrondissements. We found a two-bedroom unit with all our usual demands in the 8th arrondissement, half a block off the Champs Élysées, which allowed a view of the Eiffel, a short jaunt to the Arc de Triomphe, all the shopping of the Champs Élysées, and was less than a mile from the Louvre and Musée D’Orsay. We ended up walking to most of the destinations. Although the Metropolitan system was spotty that week due to national strikes, it didn’t impact us much because we were in the middle of it all.
We stayed here. (not an ad)
For trip two we elected to stay in the foodie region of Le Marais. We enjoyed this part of town thoroughly during the prior visit and wanted to explore it further. It’s home to the Marche des Rouge Enfants (literally the Market of the kids in red named in 1615 under the reign of Louis the XIII after a nearby orphanage where the children wore red coats) an open air market with fresh produce, meat and cheese. There’s tons of shops and restaurants here in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. It’s coated with cobblestone roads and old world architecture to die for. Major attractions include: The Centre Pompidou, Musee Picasso, Hotel de Sens, Place de Vosges, Hotel de Ville.
We stayed here. (not an ad)
The Transportation
We flew a nonstop, overnight flight from Detroit to Paris on points via AirFrance and landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 10:55 am. (To learn how we got these tickets for only the cost of tax go here!). We were greeted at the gate by our concierge… Yes, our concierge <pinkies up>. We had taken an adult trip previously and learned the joys of the airport concierge and used them for ease of mobility through the airport. This arrangement the airport has with several companies allows their agents to meet the traveler at the gate and assist them through customs in a fast-track fashion. We figured traveling overnight with possibly unslept kids, in a place where the main dialect was not our own, while navigating one of the world’s biggest airports would not be our idea of a good time. Instead, we opted to pay a concierge about 150 euro to collect us and any luggage we had checked , and take us to the front of the line for customs and right out the other door and into an Uber faster than you can blink an eye. Is this necessary? No way. This is paying for increased convenience. We used this only when coming into CDG. As we didn’t have to navigate customs on our way home, we did it on our own like the normal travelers we usually are. And we did just fine.
Red Eye Flight on AirFrance and Métropolitain
Ubers and G7 (their version of ride-sharing) are all easily available with an app from the airport. Flat-rate taxis and trains to the city exist as well but we like the ease of using the app and getting a quick transfer to our lodging while we have all our bags in tow.
The Métropolitain is efficient and easiest to via using google maps with step by step instructions on where to enter, exit and traverse while inside the underground system.
