The Best Way To Plan Your Next Trip To Paris
Best Way To Plan Your Next Trip
Going to Paris soon? One of the most asked questions I received during our trip to Paris was how did I plan our trip? I am going to show you the best way to plan your next trip to Paris and how to make the most out of your time in the city of lights.
I absolutely love to plan trips and am always the first one to volunteer. Planning every detail from the logistics to the eating, shopping, and of course where to stay. However, planning a trip to Paris has to be the most exciting trip of all. You can get as detailed as you want and walk the city for hours, or play it by ear and take things more slowly. You know best how you prefer to travel.
Here’s How To Plan Your Next Trip To Paris
For more on how I ended up going to Paris you can read here, Paris In July
There were several ways how I planned our trip to Paris in July that helped us to make the most out of our time there. We had 5 nights and roughly 5 days to explore the city and I wanted our time to count.
What Kind of Agenda Do You Want in Paris
This has to be the first question you ask when planning your trip to Paris. Is it important to see all the sites? Is this your first time? What kind of food do you like? What kind of transportation are you comfortable with?
Also, are you the kind that can go for hours upon hours? Or would you prefer to take things slowly and easy? I am the type that can go for hours. Don’t get me wrong, I love to relax at a cafè in the afternoon with wine. But, I love to go during the day and see as much as possible. I also love to walk so I don’t mind walking 10 miles a day.
Where Do You Want To Stay in Paris
Paris is broken up into 20 arrondissements which are numbered in a ‘snail shell’ shape. Think of each arrondissement as little neighborhoods, which each offering something different. Here’s a great graphic from Trip Savvy showing each arrondissement.
The most popular arrondissements are: the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th which are close to tour attractions and the metro. Tip: when you read a zip code in Paris it will look like this- 75001. The last number of the zip code always refers to which arrondissements you are located in, therefore in this example it’s arrondissement 1.
What’s My Favorite Arrondissement in Paris
My favorite arrondissement is the 6th which is technically called the Luxembourg but everyone refers to as Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I have stayed here 3 times and not sure I would stay anywhere else. To me, this is the perfect arrondissement for several reasons.
Walking distance to the Musée du Louve (just across the river) and Tuileries Gardens. Also within walking distance the beautiful Luxembourg gardens and has some of the best cafés like Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, and one of my favorite restaurants Ralphs and Poilâne for morning croissants and of course Laduree for macaroons.
This trip we stayed at Hotel Récamier, which I couldn’t recommend more. It’s a darling boutique hotel in an amazing location. You can read more about my review of the hotel here.
I’ve also stayed at a different Airbnb on our last trip and again was very happy.
Social Media Is Your Friend
Instagram and Pinterest are so easy to use this is how I planned most of the places to go for eating and sights to see. For Instagram, I made a collection in my profile to save pictures of places of interest. If you need help doing that, see this post. I made a collection titled “Paris” to which I saved restaurants, stores, bakeries, etc. It also helps to follow people who live in Paris and post regular content. Most of the places I saved where based off people who live there.
On Pinterest I made a board called “Paris in July” which you can see here. Again, I follow lots of people who either live in Paris or blog about Paris so I saved all their posts. With Pinterest it’s so easy to search what you want that I had an overabundance of information.
Make A Google Map of Paris
With google maps you can easily mark all the destinations you want to go and keep them handy for reference. I made a list titled “Paris In July” which had all the places of interest to me. This way it was easy to pull up on my phone for reference. Plus, you can keep adding to the map as you go along, I was still adding places even when we arrived in Paris.
I tried to group our days according to which arrondissement we were in for that day. That way we weren’t hoping all over the place. I will have more posts dedicated to what our days looked like and where we went.
Create A Word Document Agenda
After I planned out the google map places I started to put each day down on a word document. This way I could reference the document and see what I had planned for each day. Some days we had reservations for lunch or dinner and this way I would’t get confused as to what we were doing.
A side note though on creating an agenda- the best part of Paris is walking the streets and seeing where they take you. An agenda is good to have but don’t be so set on getting to everything on your agenda that you miss the city itself. There were several times we had reservations for lunch but were having such a good time exploring that we ended up canceling those reservations for something else.
Paris is meant to be taken in and enjoyed. You will find it more pleasurable if you let the day take you where it leads. There’s so many amazing and beautiful streets in Paris, you never know what you will find.
Whatever agenda you choose, hopefully these tips have provided the best way to plan your trip to Paris.
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