Paris France

We never expected to love Paris. Jamey assumed it would feel like New York, and everyone warned us the Parisians would be rude. Neither was true. It’s a big city that somehow stays gorgeous block after block, cleaner and more beautiful than we’d been told, and every person we dealt with was friendly to us and sweet to the girls. Paris was the bookend on a longer Italy trip, two days on the front and an airport night on the back, so we didn’t try to see it. We picked a neighborhood near the tower and let it be a taste.

We stayed in an Airbnb on Avenue de Suffren, a short walk from the Eiffel Tower and not crazy expensive, close enough that the carousel by the tower became the evening ritual. The girls got berets. They tried escargot. We bought big loaves of bread and they walked around with croissants like locals. That’s the version of Paris a 6- and 8-year-old remembers. One logistics win worth stealing: we landed at 9am, hours before check-in, and used a bag-drop service near the tower so we could start the day instead of babysitting suitcases in a café.

The day to copy

Slow breakfast at Carette, then the Louvre as a kid scavenger hunt, not a museum march. We booked the “Muse Clues” tour and it was fantastic: a private guide, two hours of treasure hunting, and it still got us right up to the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. One thing to know about private guides everywhere, not just Paris: they have no concept of time. They love to talk. Book the tour anyway, just know that going in and don’t stack anything tight behind it. Lunch after at Maison Maison down by the river, then dinner at Pink Mamma, a loud, plant-draped four floors of Italian that kids love and adults quietly love more. Gelato on the walk home is non-negotiable.

But the meal we’d build a trip around was Girafe: the rooftop table across from the Eiffel Tower, the first night, and the best dinner of the whole trip. Book it the day reservations open; the tower-view times go first.

Where we’d point you next

Our favorite corner of the city on foot was Le Marais; give it a full day if you have one. We wandered the little shops, Justice fell dead asleep halfway through the Musée Picasso (keep museum visits short with little kids), and dinner at Chez Janou closed it out right. Marché des Enfants Rouges is the market-lunch move in that quarter. For the postcard, the walk up Rue de l’Université frames the tower dead-center.

The honest caveat

Two days is a taste, and bookending Italy with Paris means the back half is just an airport hotel by Charles de Gaulle: a bed near the gate, not a second Paris trip. If you can, front-load all your Paris time and fly home from somewhere else.

We spent a spare day at Versailles on the tail of the trip, and we’re glad we saw it once. The mistake was the tour, not the palace. What we thought was a private tour turned out to be a thirty-person group with a flag and a stack of headsets; Melissa was not having it, so we used the tickets to get in, handed the headsets back, and wandered off on our own. Book skip-the-line entry direct and do it yourselves. It’s about an hour out of the city, it’s enormous, and it was brutally hot the day we went. Go early, save the gardens for the kids, and don’t try to see all of it. We checked it off, and we wouldn’t go back.