Tour de France 2023

Travel and Leisure

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I went looking for some details on our French trip, and couldn't find it, so I thought I'd do an abbreviated photo-documentary of our 21-day tour de France. Follow our clockwise route from Paris below; clicking on the images will open a gallery view with higher resolution photos. And there's detail on what it's like travelling in France in this blog post: Things I learned in France.

Our tour began by immediately heading to Reims on the TGV upon arrival at CDG. Pronounced “rance”, Reims is located in the heart of the Champagne region. Many tourists do Reims as a day-trip from Paris, and that is certainly doable, but we were heading east, so it made sense to stay here, and we also tried to use it as a decompression stop from our trans-Atlantic flight.

Rather than TGV it right to the Alsace region, it looked like Nancy was worth a look, so we booked a night there. With a metropolitan population of a little over twice that of Reims, Nancy felt bigger, and for those looking to visit, it merits a stay here.

We moved on to our new Airbnb base in Alsace for 5 nights, the incredibly cute town of Colmar. We'd been here briefly back in 2009 on our first river cruise, so we knew that it was worth coming back to explore in more depth. 

Some that visit this region prefer to stay in Strasbourg (below), but Colmar is actually closer to most of the sights and attractions that we wanted to visit, and has a similar (but much smaller) feel than Strasbourg.

With only four full days in Colmar, day trips in the region included Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg (below), the Alsace wine route, and going back to Strasbourg. The Château fell into ruins, but after German Emperor Wilhelm II took ownership, he had architect Bobo Ebhardt painstakingly reconstruct it in the early 1900s.

We did all this using the efficient train system, except for the wine route, where the Kut'zig hop on hop off shuttle was a bit of a failure (detailed in the post earlier). The postcard-cute towns of the Alsace are worthy of a day's touring, that's for sure. We’d been to Riquewhir on our river cruise, but Kaysersberg, and Eguisheim are the other ones that stand out.

Our next Airbnb for the next 5 days was in Dijon, in the Burgundy region. Again, with train travel bookending our stay, we only had 4 full days in the region. It’s a big city, but it has a charming old town centre and amazing architecture. 

Day trips included Beaune, Besançon, and Lyon. Surprisingly, Beaune (below) was a bit of a disappointment for us; it had been over-hyped in everything we read, and just didn’t seem to have the charm that we’d come to expect from the Alsace towns.

The citadel at Besançon was huge (couldn't really capture a photo of it), and is the highlight there, but there was a lot to see along the main drag that winds through town. Roman-era structures and gates still loom over roadways.

Lyon was better than I had been expecting, especially the Roman ruins at Lugdunum and the museum there, along with the Vieux Lyon area.

After our time in the Burgundy region, it was time to head back to Paris for the last leg of our trip. We chose a VRBO in the heart of the city, just west of the Pompidou Centre. We had originally booked a hotel for the trip we had planned in 2020, but Covid forced us to cancel. For the dates we wanted to rebook in 2023, it ended up that the Rugby World Cup was taking place during the same time and hotels were charging outrageous prices. It ended up being great, as the neighbourhood was very central (i.e. walking distance) to many sights, shops and restaurants.

There's so much to see in Paris, so we used a combination of Rick Steves walking tours on his Audio Europe app, and ones that I recorded from his book. It made wandering around Paris a little more structured, and added great colour-commentary to the sights in the city. The first Sunday of each month is free museum day, but rather that join the mobs of people at the Louvre and Orsay, we chose the smaller ones to visit instead.

We ventured into the Montmartre district (the one area that we really needed to use the Metro for), and unfortunately it was also the one day that it rained on us, but only for the morning. We wandered down to the Place de la Concorde, then walked up Les Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

We bought the Paris Museum pass for 48 hours, and started it at the end of the day above, to go up to the Arc for views of Paris, and then blitzed the rest of the major museums and included attractions the next day. Again, using Rick’s audio tours, we got the highlights of the Louvre, L’Orangerie, Orsay and a couple of other sites included in the PMP. 

Last day-trip for our Tour de France was Versailles (also included in the PMP, and since we were still within the 48 hour period, we were able to use that to get in). It is a sprawling, amazing complex, which was a perfect ending to our vacation.