Introduction
This is Five Cents: travel guide to France. France makes most sense as one regional corridor, not a race to tick off the whole country. This route starts with Paris, then moves south through the Loire Valley and Lyon to Provence. Use trains for the cities, and a car only where the countryside calls for one.
Start by choosing the shape of the trip
Start by choosing the shape of the trip. For a first substantial visit, give France ten to fourteen days. In a faster six-day version, keep two nights in Paris, one in Tours for the Loire, two in Lyon, and one in Avignon. The important decision is to travel south in a line. Adding Normandy, Bordeaux, and the Riviera turns a coherent journey into long crossings and short visits.
Arrive in Paris and take the train into the centre. Paris is France’s monumental capital, but its value is not a checklist of landmarks. On your first day, walk the Seine from Notre-Dame, the cathedral rebuilt and reopened after the twenty nineteen fire, towards the Louvre area and the Tuileries. This links religious, royal, and civic Paris through the public spaces that connect them.
On the second day, take the metro north to Montmartre. Its steep streets and neighbourhood life provide the counterpoint to the grand centre. Paris becomes easier to understand when you pair its monuments with a district where cafés, shops, and everyday movement set the pace. Then travel southwest by train to Tours, your Loire Valley base. The Loire is a UNESCO-recognised cultural landscape, shaped by the river, farming, towns, and centuries of royal power.
Use a car here, because the châteaux sit across a dispersed countryside. Choose Château de Chambord rather than trying to collect several in one day. Its vast scale and Renaissance design show how monarchy used architecture and landscape together as a statement of ambition. From Tours, continue southeast by train to Lyon. Set between the Rhône and Saône rivers, Lyon gives you a more compact and lived-in city than Paris, while carrying Roman, Renaissance, and modern layers.
Start in Vieux Lyon
Start in Vieux Lyon, the old town of narrow Renaissance streets. Its traboules, covered passageways through buildings and courtyards, reveal how architecture supported the city’s social and working life, including its silk workers and later the Resistance. Make food part of the route here. A bouchon is a traditional Lyon restaurant. A meal in one connects the city’s reputation for cooking with a local urban culture rather than a generic restaurant search.
The following day, walk up to Fourvière for the panorama and Lyon’s Roman historical layer. From the hill, the rivers explain the city’s geography. Below, the old town makes that history tangible. From Lyon, take the train south to Avignon, a compact Provence base on the Rhône. The Palais des Papes, the former papal palace, gives the final stage a distinct medieval centre rather than another version of Parisian monumentality.
Follow it with a market-and-food morning. Provence is understood through produce, olive oil, herbs, and the connection between its cities and surrounding agricultural landscape. For a longer Provence stay, a car opens up villages and countryside beyond Avignon. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence can be a light pre-trip companion for this stage, as a personal portrait of rural rhythms and social texture rather than a factual guide to contemporary France.
Save Normandy and Mont-Saint-Michel for a separate heritage route. They need at least two days and pull you northwest. Save Nice and the Riviera for a coastal trip built around Mediterranean urban life. On this journey, Avignon is the better ending because it keeps the route moving south without turning it into an east-west detour.
Remember three choices
Remember three choices. Travel south from Paris instead of zigzagging across France. Use rail for the major cities and a car only for rural Loire or Provence. And choose one Provençal base rather than adding every famous region.
To continue, you can generate Paris in Four Days: Neighborhoods, Museums and Walks. To explore further, you can generate Southern France: Lyon, Avignon, Marseille and Nice.