Internet in France

You could buy an unlocked 3G mobile GSM hotspot device here (Amazon has them) and then buy a sim card for it when you get to France. Or you could rent such a device from a wireless carrier, such as Orange, in France. Not sure which alternative would be less expensive - probably the former. If you own a newer smartphone that works in Europe, your smartphone itself could act as your mobile hotspot, but be sure you know what your carrier charges for an international data plan. The tech-savvy among us may have other solutions.

I'm not tech-savvy, but look into Boingo, which has monthly rates for mobile Internet access in France. But you'll also find that small villages often have cafe/bars that have wifi. That's what I generally relied on for my blogging in France, or public libraries, but that won't help at night.

We use a blogging site called posterous. One posting option they offer is just to email the day's post, including text and up to five photos, to their site and they post it to their server locally. We find that fast, easy and reliable. You could get either a local SIM card or a roaming package on your own smartphone and email it. Doesn't use much data at all. But when we've tried to post directly to the site via wi-fi, the posting time seems to grind on forever. So we always use the email version now, even when wifi connected. Our daughter is doing this daily now during her year abroad in Switzerland. Direct uploads were taking several hours, emails are just swoosh and gone... Just another option. I haven't seen this mentioned here before.

Patricia, this thread deals with an Internet connection in the U.K., but some of the ideas should be the same for France. Wifi along English canals?