The same man who has never expressed any interest in visiting Paris was offering to take me to the City of Love, in springtime nonetheless? I was floored. Turns out it wasn’t the Eiffel tower and a bakery filled with baguettes he was imagining, it was all about the train ride itself. My engineer husband has been absolutely fascinated by the modern marvel that is the English channel tunnel train since it first opened and he was thrilled to experience it firsthand. Whatever your own reasons are for wanting to visit Paris, here are the tips you need to know for planning your day trip from London. This could potentially mean that in one day trip you would spend 4 hours just at the train station for a one-day round trip. Then add on another 5 hours of train travel itself since each way takes about 2.5 hours. That’s 9 hours just for the transportation round trip. This leaves very little time to explore Paris in one day. Instead, we decided that traveling late at night the night before, finding a simple place to sleep and shower, and waking up in Paris, sounded like a lot more fun. We spent the day in Paris and went “home” to London after dinner. This ended up being a brilliant idea because late-evening train tickets are much cheaper than morning tickets. We booked the last train from London to Paris on Day 1 and the last train from Paris to London on Day 2. For our family of four, the money we saved on train tickets nearly paid for the overlapping hotel stay for one night since we had already booked our London AirBNB for the whole week. I asked a friend of mine who works in Paris for a recommendation and he suggested Hotel de Flore. I had too book two separate rooms to have enough room for all four of us but the hotel was exactly what we needed. They chose to stay at a hotel right at the train station and said it was simple and safe and worked out well for their party of two. We booked a locker at City Locker near the train station. One locker held all four of our small travel bags so that we didn’t need to lug them all around town all day. There is just so much to see and I wasn’t sure how we’d be feeling or what the weather would be. So I made the biggest mistake of the trip: I didn’t really have any sort of plan. I thought we could just “walk around and see things” and decide while we were there. I didn’t realize how faaaarrrrr apart all the major sites in Paris are from each other if you plan to walk between them. We ubered back to the train station because I couldn’t move one step more. We walked 30,000+ steps that day and it was totally, completely, physically exhausting. With just one main meal in Paris, there was a lot of pressure for the food to be good. Thankfully, we happened upon an excellent choice. You can read more about what to eat in Paris here. Our feet were hurting so much by the time we made it to the Eiffel tower, we had to make our way very slowly back towards the city center. We stopped and looked in windows, stopped to sit and enjoy an afternoon treat, and paused as often as we wanted for lots of pictures. Arrive to the station, ready to check in, two hours before your train departs. You’ll be served dinner on the train back to London, but you can also bring on some French pastries or desserts if you prefer a taste of Paris for your ride back. Was our day in Paris worth that additional expense? Riding the chunnel train was a childhood dream for my husband. It was his ONE BIG THING he wanted to do on our family vacation. So to see him giddy as the train dove down under the ocean? Absolutely, this experience was worth it. For me, this is what travel is all about — an adventure that makes your heart sing even if it isn’t the most practical thing on paper. If I had planned the day better and we had focused more on one lasting experience, I think I would have felt a little better about the time we spent away from London. We all just loved London so much, I wonder what more we might have experienced there without the Paris excursion. But my kids can now say they’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, they were in the city that’s hosting this summer’s Olympics, they saw Notre Dame before it is completely renovated and reopened to the public. Paris in this moment is different than the Paris they might visit in the future. It is hard to have any regrets about that. Whether or not a day trip from London to Paris is worth it for you and your family will all depend on your vacation goals, dreams, attitude, and budget. For my family, we would absolutely choose to do it again on our first trip but we would not choose to do it a second time. The next time we see France will include a full visit to Paris itself so we can dive deeper into what the city has to offer and not just a “drive-by” day trip.
