Our Month in France Itinerary: Slow Travel With Kids

If you’re just finding this series, we’re taking our 3 kids to France for a month next summer, and I’m documenting the whole process—from why we’re doing it to choosing where we’ll stay, figuring out the budget, and eventually getting on that plane. Start with Why We’re Taking Our Three Kids to France for the Summer to get the full story behind the trip.

When I say we're spending a month in France, I don't really think of it as a 32-day vacation. That's not how I'm planning it anyway.

The first two weeks are intentionally going to be pretty slow.

We're going to settle into our new home base, get the kids into their camps and programs, and give everyone time to adjust.

We'll spend afternoons exploring our town. We'll try a lot of cafés. We'll figure out the grocery stores, do laundry, and probably get on the wrong bus at least once while we're learning the transit system.

And a big part of those first two weeks is going to be language.

I want the kids hearing and using French every day, not just memorizing a few phrases before we leave. The goal isn't for them to come home fluent obviously. It's to give them a chance to actually experience what it's like to communicate in another language and start getting comfortable with it. We do so much to make our kids lives easy and comfortable, and this is going to be tough. They’ll have to persevere. 

Then, once we've had some time to settle in, we're going to pick up the pace a little.

I've got a minimum of three trips planned, most of them one or two nights away.

But we're not going to spend a month constantly packing and unpacking. A simple backpack and change of clothes should make it easy to go somewhere, explore, stay a night or two, and then come back to our home base for a few days before we head out again.

And our timing is intentional, too.

My husband will join us in the middle of the trip, so he'll get to enjoy some of the slower days at home with us, as well as most of our bigger overnight adventures.

That's really what I want this month to feel like:

Part summer camp.

Part everyday life.

Part adventure.

I don't want my kids to remember France as a month of rushing from one historical site to the next.

I want them to remember the café we kept going back to. Their favorite snack at the grocery store. The bus the big kids mastered all on their own to get to classes. The afternoon we wandered around with nowhere we needed to be.

And then the trips where we packed a bag, hopped on a train, and went somewhere completely new. And returning to our home base actually feels like we’re home.

To me, that's the difference between taking a vacation somewhere and actually living somewhere for a little while.