Need help with 2 night side trip outside of Paris

Amboise.. to tour the Loire Valley Chateaus.. cute town.. easy to get around, and ruins there too!! An hour or so from Paris by frequent trains.

On edit.. while Amboise is easy to get around to tour Chateaus you will need to rent a car ( its easy to drive around that area) or take tours from town( Acco Dispo do small van tours so you could avoid big bus tours)
www.accodispo-tours.com/

The Loire Valley is good.
You could also go north to Normandy, D-Day Beaches, Mont St. Michel (probably no vineyards there, but they do have Calvados)
Or east to the Reims, Champagne (the famous champagne caves), and various WW1 (Verdennes) and WW2 sights.

Uhm, I assume you're *not going to have the rental car while you're in Paris?*

AC in your Paris room, and room in whatever other place you decide to stay, will be a plus for a July trip. Without AC in the room, you would have to open the window, and many hotels in France don't have screens on the windows. With France you never know what the temp will be, but July and August are the most likely times, if it's going to be hot enough to be uncomfortable in a small room with a closed window.
AC in a room is not automatic the way it is here.

I agree with Amboise, or I would stay in Bayeux in Normandy and explore the town one day, then do all the DDay beaches and museums and maybe Mt St Michel.

The Loire is a good choice but i will also suggest Beaune or Semur-en-Aixois in Burgundy. Plenty of vinyards, great food, and some stunning sights.

You will probably want 2 vehicles for 8 people and their bags.

Check out www.bandbnormandie.com in Normandy. It's centrally located and has a house you can book that will accommodate 8 people. We (just 2 of us) stayed there for 6 nights and were 30 minutes from the D Day beaches and only 12 miles from Bayeux with the famous tapestry, museum, and cathedral. We took a D Day tour that departs from behind the Churchill Hotel. It's 90 minutes to Mont St. Michel, and easy drive on the four-lane motorway. After MSM we drove around the bay to Cancale, in Brittany actually, about 15 miles, for a seafood lunch on the quay with MSM visible across the bay. We then drifted back along the secondary roads, stopping in villages to buy meats, cheeses, breads, and Calvados for a picnic upon our return to La Ferme, all in one day. Normandy for two nights will offer all that you might need. We had our own GPS and had downloaded addresses of places to favorites, plus we had a Michelin road map of Normandy. Driving in Normandy was easy.

Thanks for all this great information.

We were looking at the Champagne area but we were having trouble finding housing for 8 the nights we have available. Also, someone told us it was mostly rebuilt after WWII so it didn't have that "charm". But maybe that's not true???

But the Loire Valley area looks promising.

Has anyone taken a tour there? Or stayed somewhere special that they would recommend?