On the flight home, I thought about what went well and/or according to plan and what didn’t or what I would have done differently. This seems to happen every time, so I thought it might be helpful to share. Our dates were 9/20-10/6.
This was our basic itinerary:
3 nights Bayeux
3 nights Loire (Amboise)
3 nights Burgundy (Beaune)
6 nights Paris
Above all, weather was a bigger factor than we anticipated. It didn’t stop us from doing anything we wanted to, but it was colder and wetter than expected. The locals we met assured us it was somewhat unusually, but always bring rain gear. We could have saved luggage space by leaving all warm weather/swimming clothes at home.
Bayeux and Amboise, in a good way, were bigger cities than we expected. Especially Bayeux. They were both delightful cities. We could have spent more time in the cities themselves. That said, a lot of shoppes and quite a few restaurants were closed in both cities. I assume this was at least partially seasonal. Nothing you can do about the shoppes, but we would have greatly benefited from making dinner reservations ahead of time, especially in Amboise.
Amboise wine tasting:
We explored two regions; Cheverny and Chinon. Simply put, skip Cheverny. The wine in Cheney was pretty ok. The scenery and wine itself in Chinon was far superior. It was also very reasonably priced. I’m sure there’s plenty great wine we missed, but this was our experience.
Guedelon:
We used this to breakup our trip from Amboise to Beaune. I had probably too high expectations for this. At first we were very underwhelmed. All of the various exhibitions were empty, unmanned. Turns out, they were just at lunch! Seriously. An hour later, they were all cobbling away. Try to avoid going at lunch time.
Beaune:
Food highlight of the trip. La Lune was the best meal we had on the whole trip. Not exactly traditional but just amazing. Beaune is the French and maybe world capital for wine, for good reason. It is very, very good, but could also be very expensive.
Dijon:
We used this as stopover on the way to Paris. Highly recommend the “owl trail.” It’s a self-guided, marked path through the city. It was a great way to see the sites efficiently. There were several museums along the way that were mostly free, including the main city museum. Our Dijon visit was a highlight of the whole trip, and we were only there for half a day. It is a wonderful, medium sized city and we wished we would have spent the night there.
Paris:
It’s amazing. Get comfortable biking. Just go and spend as much time as you can there.