My story is too long to post at one time, so I'll post it by locations (Loire, Burgundy, Alsace and Paris).
France trip report April 2026
Loire Valley
Well, the time finally arrived for our long awaited trip to France. I’d wanted to go back to France since 1993 (I visited Paris for two weeks staying with friends who lived there for three years. My husband stayed home with our two then toddlers). Now was the time!
Planning–
As usual it took me months to fully plan the trip. Many many posts on travel forums and many lovely people answered those posts and gave helpful and insightful info. I couldn’t have done it as well without that help!
I am an overachiever at planning!! We also like to pack in a lot when we travel!! I plan to the n’th degree and always have a Plan B. Most of the time my plans work out, sometimes they don’t and sometimes surprises pop up (both good and not so good). Detailed planning gives me the perceived feeling of “control”. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me. My husband, on the other hand, simply goes along for the ride. He enjoys our trips, but really does not plan at all. He says I love to plan and he hates to plan, so it works :)
We rented a car for the first 12 nights and used public transportation in Paris for the last three nights. We rode two long distance trains (Montparnasse-St. Pierre des Corps and Colmar-Paris). We stayed in two B&B’s, one Airbnb and one religious guest house on our journey. I made reservations at all of the restaurants we went to. We pre-reserved tickets where we could. We used the Passion Monuments pass in Paris. We were celebrating my husband’s birthday and our wedding anniversary along the trip too.
I tried to highlight the less well known things we did, saw or ate and just mention the more prominent busy places we saw.
We had some hiccups on the trip. The first day being by far the worst! Please read on to see what a fiasco our first travel day was, but how wonderful the trip turned out.
Starting at the beginning-
TUESDAY–
The day started out great. We had a 6:30 pm nonstop flight CVG-CDG. We parked our car off site of the airport, rode the shuttle to the airport and arrived at CVG around 3:30. We breezed through security with TSA pre-check, got to our gate, sat down and about 4:00 we heard an announcement that our flight was delayed until 9:10 pm due to a flight officer calling in sick and a replacement being flown in from Atlanta :(
Well, that meant right off the bat we had to go to Plan B as we would probably miss our train from CDG-SPDC. So, not a great start, but it got worse.
WEDNESDAY–
Our flight was uneventful and we arrived at CDG at 10:30 am instead of 8:30 am as scheduled.
Next snafu–EES. It was a nightmare. Everyone backed up, all the auto gates were red X’d and we had long lines to go through manual passport control. All in all it took 1 hour and 10 minutes to get through EES. Missed our pre-purchased (70 euros/2 persons) 11:17 am train CDG-SPDC. We were getting frazzled by now, BUT it continued to go downhill.
Plan B went into effect–taxi (65 euros) from CDG–Montparnasse to catch one of the many trains to SPDC to pick up our car rental by 6 pm closing time. But, yes, it got worse.