#32 - Travel Guide to France

When you’ve ticked off those must-see sites on your list – the Palace of Versailles, Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, a dazzling little island that makes you feel you have stepped back centuries, the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum and the sun-kissed French Riviera, the boulevards of Paris and the majestic castles of the Loire Valley - there are a million more thrilling sites and places to discover – prehistoric caves, troglodyte villages, the steep cobbled streets of Saint-Emilion in Bordeaux, the medieval town of Annecy in Haute-Savoie and Claude Monet’s house and garden in Giverny, Normandy.

So let’s talk about how you’ll get there…

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Podcast 32 - Travel guide to France

Janine: Bonjour, hello, and bienvenue, welcome to The Good Life France Podcast. I’m your host Janine Marsh. I was born in London, but this year I’m celebrating 20 years of having a home in France - though I have loved France for a lot longer, since I was a teenager and visited Paris on a school exchange trip!

I’m a writer and the Editor of The Good Life France website and magazine. I’m also maid to way too many animals, and when I’m not looking after them, I travel all round France exploring the culture, traditions, food and wine and more. And I absolutely love to share what I discover with you on this podcast alongside my podcast partner Olivier Jauffrit.

Olivier: Bonjour tout le monde! A super big welcome to this podcast all who are new to it and all who have been with us longer – apparently, we have listeners in 148 countries now – that’s just astonishing isn’t it!

Janine: It’s amazing, seriously thank you so much to everyone listening, and huge, huge thanks to everyone who shares us.

Oli: Right, it’s time to get this new episode kicked off – let’s take a look at what’s on the agenda today!

Janine: We’re talking travel in France today, Oli. It’s that time of the year when people are planning holidays in France, wondering where to go, what to see and how to get there!

Oli: That sounds like a brilliant topic, especially as I’ve just moved back to France from the UK, to sunny Lyon, and I too am planning to travel more and discover/rediscover the Hexagone as we French call France!

Janine: France is a land of legendary landmarks known all over the world – from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to the blooming lavender fields of Provence. Around 90 million visitors arrive in France each year making it head and shoulders the most visited country in the world. They are seduced by the culture, the history, architecture, food and wine, they are beguiled by the many pleasures of France, and once is never enough. And it’s not just visitors that love to visit France, staycations are popular with the French with some 80% taking holidays in their own country. How about you Oli – will you be taking a holiday in France this year?

Oli: Of course I will. The difficulty is to choose where. Being new in Lyon, we now have a brand you perimeter of destinations to discover and so many possibilities. Some of the best parts of France are just a few hours away. The Beaujolais, Burgundy, the old volcanos of Auvergne, the French Alps, Marseille… So we have started a debate in my family – like who wants to go where. It’s not finalised yet. But we have also decided that we will NOT visit our families this summer. The reason being that for the first time in 20 years for me and 30 years for Christelle, we live in France, so guess what: family will come to us for once ;-)

What about you Janine, I’m fairly certain you’ll be holidaying in France right?

Janine: You know what, I haven’t had a holiday in years! We have so many animals it’s impossible for me and my other half to get away at the same time. When we had just three dogs and three cats, we could pretty much persuade or bribe one of our kids to babysit them. But now we have four dogs, seven cats, 3 ducks, 4 geese and 28 chickens and the kids are strangely busy all the time! Mark, my other half, is happy to stay home, he’s a real home bod. But I love to travel, so I travel solo and go somewhere new in France pretty much every month – and it’s work, but sort of like a holiday, though if Mark is listening, it’s not a holiday, absolutely not! This year I’m going to the snowy French Alps in January to meet husky dogs, walk in the snow and make a snow angel. In February I’m going to Menton in the far south, on the border with Italy, then to the Gulf of St Tropez. In March I’m going to spend a day at Alain Ducasse’s patisserie school in Paris and another day at his pastry school in Yssingeaux in the Auvergne Rhone Alpes, then some time in Lyon – where I’ll be meeting up with you Oli. In April I’ll head to Picardy to visit the new centre dedicated to the French language, and to Clermont Ferrand to hike up a volcano and also to the Lot department to explore gorgeous medieval villages and sort of have a holiday with a stay at a gorgeous 16th century holiday home – the Moulin sur Cele which is near lovely Cahors. In May I’ll head to Cognac for a short break to explore the area and also relax at a lovely holiday home called. Cognac No. 22. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing after that, maybe a cruise on the Burgundy Canal with CroisiEurope (I love their cruises and do one every year, I love the food, the friendly people, getting to see lots of places in a short time plus I find it great for my writing to have some downtime where everything is done for me!), maybe a trip to the Gers, Paris again, perhaps Dordogne – I’ll have to see. I go everywhere by train – and I’ll be talking about that later.

Oli: That sounds amazing! But you know, in France you will never run out of things to see and places to visit. World class art, magnificent architecture, more than 40,000 chateaux and fortresses, glorious beaches, snowy mountains, historic cities, picturesque villages – there is just so much to fall in love with.

Janine: It’s true - and when you’ve ticked off those must-see sites off your list – the Palace of Versailles, Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, a dazzling little island that makes you feel you have stepped back centuries, the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum and the sun-kissed French Riviera, the boulevards of Paris and the majestic castles of the Loire Valley - there are a million more thrilling sites and places to discover – prehistoric caves, troglodyte villages, the steep cobbled streets of Saint-Emilion in Bordeaux, the medieval town of Annecy in Haute-Savoie and Claude Monet’s house and garden in Giverny, Normandy.

But now let’s talk about how you’ll get there…

Oli: The French travel en voiture, by car, mostly. Between the middle of July and the middle of August the roads are considerably busier than usual as this is the prime time for French holiday makers to get away as well as peak tourist season. There’s even a website called Bison Fete which monitors and reports on how busy the roads are.

Janine: If you ever drive in France, you’ll notice that the French are obsessed with roundabouts, carousels in French. A whopping 30% of all the traffic roundabouts in the world are to be found on the roads of France. The very first one in the world was at the Place de l’Etoile (Star Square), now called Place Charles de Gaulle, on which sits the historic Arc de Triomphe, commissioned in 1806 by Napoleon Bonaparte. A rather nightmarish twelve boulevards converge here and it’s said that if you’re involved in an accident driving round the circle, insurance companies split the cost fifty-fifty as each driver is considered at fault. Allegedly it’s the only place in the city where an accident is not judged.

Oli: The roads are generally very good in France. Auto routes and toll roads speed you across the country. In fact we are so fond of our auto routes we give them nicknames! The A6 which runs from Paris to Lyon where I live is called the L'Autoroute du Soleil, the Sun Motorway because you’re heading for the sunny bit of France! And the A26 – which runs from Calais in the north to Troyes in Champagne is called the Autoroute des Anglais, or the "Motorway of the English" – because millions of people every year travel from the UK by ferry and train in their cars and head south from Calais.

Janine: Bad mistake, very bad mistake! I live one hour from Calais port and it is a glorious area, like Dordogne, green and lush and hilly – but with the seaside too, the beautiful Opal Coast which JM Turner loved to paint and which Charles Dickens wrote about – he lived here for many years. It’s a most beautiful, authentic and friendly part of France.

Oli: It is – you know what they say about people in the north “they have the sun in their hearts.” But back to those roads. Road travel then is easy in France, and it’s not just the motorways, the country lanes are rarely busy. And sometimes you really need a car to get to see places where there is no public transport.

Janine: Which brings us rather neatly to rail travel… my preferred mode of getting around.

The state-owned rail network SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer) makes travel across parts of France very easy and travel via the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) trains, which travel at speeds of up to 320km/h connect Paris to every region. Trains whisk you across France, Paris to Bordeaux in just two hours, Paris to Marseille in less than 3.5 hours.

But in rural areas public transport is a bit more of a challenge. Where I live in rural northern France, Pas-de-Calais, the nearest train station is a thirty-minute drive away and fast trains are not an option, instead the services are provided by TER (Transport Express Regional) or Corail trains, which tend to be older trains and much slower. It takes me 2.5 hours at the quickest to get to Paris which is just 240 kilometres away, compared to the fast train from Paris to Bordeaux which is around 600 kilometres takes just two hours.

The fast train services to stations in the main cities in all the departments of France then connect to slower trains.

When it comes to buying tickets – there are a few things to know.

Oli: The earlier you buy your ticket for TGV trains or intercity trains, before you need to travel, the cheaper it will be. But often tickets are not on sale more than 4 months before the travel date! And the price difference is huge, you can pay 6 times more on the day than you would have paid if you booked in advance

Janine: You can buy train tickets through SNCF online or their app or through other companies, or in person at ticket offices. A lot of bigger stations in cities have SNCF sales offices on site – but in my experience there are always horrendous queues.

If you have a printed ticket – you will need to compost it before you board the train. The first time I got a train on my own and the ticket collector came round to check ticket and asked me why I hadn’t composted my ticket I was flabbergasted, I hadn’t even used it, let alone put it in the compost bin. But this is not about recycling – but time stamping your ticket. There are little yellow machines at the entry to the platform area and you push your ticket into a slot and it stamps it! Weird yes. But true.

Oli: Always leave plenty of time to get on your train, often they are very long, you’ll be assigned a seat in advance and your carriage could be a long walk down the platform, sometimes trains split into two and go different ways – so always get in the right carriage! And sometimes you have to have your ticket scanned which can cause queues.

You can also track your train times through the SNCF App – no we’re not working for them, but it can make it easier for you to travel, the app will show your platform number and if there are any delays.

Janine: On the whole I love travelling by train. It can sometimes seem like strikes are almost non-stop when you read the news but in 12 years of train travel in France, I don’t know how many hundreds and hundreds of journeys, I’ve only had strike issues twice. The people that work on the trains really do take pride in their jobs, they wear a smart uniform, they’re generally really helpful and the trains are clean and comfortable. And I love the jingle that plays at all French train stations when they’re announcing a train departure or arrival – it’s iconic and mostly I get that frisson of excitement when I hear it – unless they’re announcing a delay or cancellation then it’s the ring tone of doom!

Oli: Oh that sound – yes everyone who has ever travelled on a French train knows that tune!

You can also cycle across France! Cycling is a national sport in France, after all this is the country that invented the Tour de France, and you’ll often spot a lycre-clad enthusiast, or a whole raft of cyclists hogging the road. There are numerous dedicated cycle routes and voices vertes (green ways) which are traffic free. The French part of La Scandibérique (which runs from Norway to Spain) is known as the Euro Velo 3 and runs for 1700km through France from the Belgium border in the far north, through Paris and the Loire Valley through to the Pays Basque in the far south.

Janine: And there are bus services which often run from outside major train stations. They’re called Gare Routieres. Often there are boards up in the stations giving details of bus departures and arrivals. Not like the buses in Paris which you can hop on and off of with your bus pass (which you can buy at stations, tabacs etc). but buses that you book like trains.

Oli: We’ve done trains and automobiles – now planes. Last year, France banned short-haul domestic flights. Now any journeys that you can that you can take by train in 2.5 hours can’t be taken as a flight, for instance, Paris / Bordeaux, Paris / Lyon and Paris /Nantes. But you can take a flight from Paris to Marseille for instance.

Janine: You saying that reminds me of a story that was in all the newspapers last year about air taxis! There were loads of reports that for the 2024 Paris Olympics electric air taxis would be rolled out to help get people from one venue to another. The trouble is, they can only carry one passenger at a time, I think the general consensus is that it’s not quite where it needs to be – but I’ve heard there’s disagreement between various authorities, some saying it's absurd, and others wanting to support the effort with funding. And it would cost more two to three times as much as a normal taxi and a lot more than the metro. Would you use it Oli?

Oli: Well it’s like a tiny helicopter that goes up vertically and comes down vertically. Maybe one day… but for now I will take the metro, the Paris underground trains. Did you know that Metro line 1 was opened in 1900 and the line linked Porte Maillot to the Porte de Vincennes where the Olympics were held that year! Now the Paris Metro runs all over Paris and out to the suburbs, and many major cities have metro systems, as well as buses, trains and trams.

Janine: It was originally called the Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris (“The Paris Metropolitan Railway Company”), which gradually shortened down to metro. The Metro has it’s own jingle which is played for announcements. It’s quite funky!

Oli: There are 304 stations in Paris, 16 lines and it’s growing, 4 more metro lines are currently being dug out. It’s said that in central Paris you are never more than 500 metres from a metro station! And it takes around 60 seconds to go by metro from one station to another.

Janine: The deepest metro station is Abessess, at the bottom of Montmartre. I once walked up the stairs there, nearly gave me a heart attack. It’s 118 feet underground, and there are 285 steps which wind around a spiral staircase. You can take the lift though! At the entrance to the station is a stunning glass cover – created by architect Hector Guimard. He designed many of the iconic entrances between 1900 and 1913.

Oli: It’s said that the Paris metro covers 600,000 miles a day – the equivalent of ten times around the world!

Janine: You often see the Paris Metro featured in films – Midnight in Paris for instance, or the Da Vinci Code. But all may not be what it seems. At the Porte de Lilas metro station, which is not far from Pere Lachaise Cemetery which we told you about in our Paris Uncovered episode, there is an unused platform which is often rented out to film companies – along with a train and driver! And if you’re in Paris on the third weekend of September which is when the jour de Patrimoine takes place, you can go and visit the film set!

Oli: Many stations are named after the street above, the neighbourhood, or famous people, Presidents, like Charles de Gaulle and Franklin D Roosevelt – no Boris Johnson station though, saints, writers. But some have some unusual names. Like Metro Blanche. The name refers to the white dust that covered houses from carts carrying plaster from the quarries near Montmartre!

Janine: There is also a metro station called Bonne-Nouvelle, which means good news, named after a local church, and it always makes me laugh to think that the onboard announcement when you’re arriving there is “The next station is good news!”

Oli: And some stations are really fascinating. Arts et Metiers for instance on line 11 is kitted out like Captain Nimo’s copper submarine! And at the Louvre metro, there are replica treasure from the museum. And many stations have artistic tiled walls and frescoes.

Janine: Ok, let’s talk water! Another way to travel is by boat! I already mentioned CroisiEurope, who run river and canal cruises all over France as well as the Mediterranean. Then there’s Paris with its river taxi service and cruises. And if you want to get to the Island of Corsica you can take a ferry. France is a land of rivers so boat travel plays quite a big part even to this day. In the old days when goods were often transported by boat, canals were created – now they’re fabulous for holidays on barges. And there are often boat bridges still in use – I went on one near Rouen last year when I was at the Rouen Armada. You drive your car onto a floating platform on one side of the river and cross to the other side.

And travel in France isn’t just about how you get from A to B. France has such a diverse landscape and so many pleasures to experience. You can travel from the sea to the mountains, and discover France in diverse ways from sailing on the Seine on a cruise from Honfleur to Paris like the Normans in the Middle Ages, or by exploring the canals of Burgundy or Provence, you can cycle past fields of smiling sunflowers and aromatic lavender, whizz through glorious countryside from city to city by train, drive the empty rural roads or the speedy autoroutes – it’s easy to get around visit the many sites that have shaped the history of France.

Oli: If you want to travel the French way here are some of our top tips. Visit the local markets, many have tables and chairs set up where you can try local products - or have a picnic

Janine: Don’t check your work email while on holiday, switch off, relax and recharge your inner batteries – it’s the French way!

Oli: Pack a light raincoat, even if you’re going to the south of France in the summer, it’s not unknown for it to rain

I hope you enjoyed the travel feature – and if you’d like more ideas about where to travel to – we’ve got loads of episodes that will inspire you!

But, now it’s time for a listener’s question

Oli: In every episode of this podcast, we answer one of your questions – and we don’t mind what you ask us! Let’s find out what today’s question is.

Janine: Today’s question is from Sarah Tatty of Ohio, USA. She wants to know “do the French make New Year’s resolutions?”

So, Oli – you’re French – do you make New Year’s Resolutions?

Oli: Well yes actually I do… and it’s a common thing to do in France. The newspapers and magazines are full of helpful tips for those whose New Year’s Resolutions include losing weight, doing more exercise the usual thing! Do you have any new year resolutions Janine?

Janine: My neighbours say “bonnes intentions” rather than “bonnes resolutions” – they intend to do better, but I think it implies an element of flexibility which I like more – so I have good intentions, like eating less cake this year but I’m already prepared to fail! How about you?

Oli: Well, my bonnes intentions or bonnes resolutions are usually always the same year after year: exercising more. And year after year, I fail miserably keeping them. At one point I should try something else. Eating more chocolate sounds like an easier one to keep…

Thanks so much for that question, Laura. If you also have a question for us – feel free to send it to janine@thegoodlifefrance.com or via our podcast newsletter. And, if there’s a topic you want to know more about – let us know!

Thank you, a huge merci beaucoup, to everyone for listening to our podcast from all around the world! And an enormous thank you for sharing the podcast with your friends and family, we’re truly grateful when you do that.

Oli: You’ve been listening to Janine Marsh and me Olivier Jauffrit. You can find me at parischanson.fr

Janine: And you can find me and heaps of information about France – where to visit, culture, history, recipes – everything France - at thegoodlifefrance.com where you can subscribe to the podcast, my weekly newsletter about France and our totally brilliant, totally free magazine which you can read at magazine.thegoodlifefrance.com

But for now, it’s au revoir from me.

Olivier: And goodbye from me.

Janine: Speak to you soon!

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#32 - Travel Guide to France

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