Leaving to Paris in about 10 days

Do you have a Paris guide book yet? If so, great. If not, I would suggest you get one as soon as possible as it is full of information that you can use to find inexpensive places to stay and eat, especially in RS Paris Guide Book which can be purchased elsewhere on this web site. I have no connection with the RS organization.

KhaySyn, at this point I would put all my energy into finding accomadations.. you have hit the busiest time for hotels and apartments in Paris, sept and early October are major trade show and fashion weeks season.. so business travel is way up. With 6-8 days I don't "see Europe", I visit two places max..frankly my shortest visit to Paris was 9 days and that was too short for me. Unfortunately at this late date you have missed out on cheap tickets for London on Eurostar , but if money is not a huge issue then taking the eurostar to London is easy and fast way to see another country.. its only 2.5 hours city center to city center , no need to commute to airports. If you haven't booked airline tickets its smartest to book an open jaw or multi destination ticket( not two one ways!) , they often are not much more then a roundtrip ticket and you can save time not backtracking, ie: fly into
Paris , stay 4 days , then Eurostar to London, spend 4 days then fly home from London. You could do similar with Rome/Paris, except I would fly on Easyjet or Vueling to Rome from Paris. .

If I remember from previous posts, you are flying on buddy passes,yes? If so, can the person who has given them to you perhaps get you into say Paris and maybe home from say Amsterdam? Would not suggest going home from Heathrow as the airport tax is very expensive, even with buddy pass. We paid about 100 pounds when flew out of Heathrow and on different trip only about 10 euro when flew out of Amsterdam, something to be thinking about.

Charlie and Pat are most correct. Your first step is to nail down Paris accomodations. I'll repeat my standard advice to look at Eurocheapo http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/. But the places it lists are not secrets, so many of them are likely to be booked already. Your next step is to get a guidebook (or two) for Paris. I'd get Rick Steves and another one, so you get more than one opinion. And your third step is to look at your funds. If you can book an open-jaw ticket from the US and you've got a lot of money, you can go to cities in neighboring countries, like London, Amsterdam, or Brussels/Bruges. But the fast trains on these routes use "airline pricing," and you're too close to travel to get any significant discounts, so you'll probably pay several hundred dollars per person for these tickets. You can check tickets from Paris to London on http://www.eurostar.com/ and tickets from Paris to Brussels or Amsterdam on https://www.thalys.com/fr/en/. The same problem about airline pricing applies to domestic fast trains (TGV's) in France, but shorter routes on non-TGV trains will not have this problem. If there's a place you want to go, you can look on http://en.voyages-sncf.com/en/ to check fares (choose France as your ticket collection country). If you don't have an open-jaw ticket, I'd spend the whole time in Paris, and plan day-trips to places like Versailles, that don't require advance planning and don't cost a fortune to get to. Particularly if you only have 6 days on the ground, you'll still be "hitting the highlights" in that time.

Ah Paris, our favorite city, in all of the world. Truly a magical place. What an amazing trip you will have. Here are a few less touristy sites in the city we love that would be great for photos although not all allow photography inside, the outsides are great: Musee Nissim de Camondo Musée Jacquemart-André Musée Marmottan Monet La Maison de Victor Hugo Musée Cognacq-Jay Our Obligatory every trip Touristy must do and I've gotten some fun shots of the Bar's sign and entrance: Harry's Bar Best and affordable restaurant view, I'll paste an article for you, the restaurant at the top of Pretemps. Make sure you work your way all the way up to the roof there, bc there are other restaurants along the way!
http://www.parisprovencevangogh.com/paris/paris-bargain-lunch-with-a-view-on-rooftop-of-au-printemps We always stay in the 9th near the Opera Garnier, lots of restaurants and metro options and you can take the Roissy bus from CDG and it drops you off right at the Opera and picks you up near by too to take you back to CDG you really can't beat the price of the Roissy bus unless you lug your luggage down to the metro. If you like Monet a fun thing to do is to take the train to Giverny, get there early and then take the afternoon train back and go to Musée de l'Orangerie (Its a day of Monet!). You'll go crazy with the camera at Giverny! Grab lunch at Hotel Baudy. Palace day trips, everyone loves Versailles but we found it to be sooo big and overwhelming and WOW crowded, we loved Chantilly and Fontainebleau. I don't remember the tickets being expensive and we bought them last minute for both. I hope this was helpful!!

Make sure to spend some time in the Luxembourg Gardens, walk around the two islands and along the river, and spend some time sitting, relaxing and people watching at an outdoor cafe that's not next to a tourist site. My favorite day trips are: Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte and Fontainebleau. Rent bikes in the garden at Versailles, most fun way to get around the extensive grounds.

If you want to go to London, you could fly into London to avoid the tax, and fly home from Paris.