Briefings/15
Travel · France
France beyond Paris
A country that is not a day trip from the capital, and not a single idea of food, stone or weather.
8 minute read · Desk edition, October 2026
Leave on purpose
Paris is a complete trip. It is also a bad base for the rest of France if you mean to see it between breakfast and a late train back. Lyon is a morning on the TGV and a different country of cooking. Bordeaux is wine country that happens to have a serious city. Nice is the Mediterranean, which is not the Luberon, which is not Normandy. Pick one.
The TGV makes people greedy. Three hours is not ‘nearby’ when you are also changing hotels. Two nights is the minimum in a French city that is not Paris. One night is a station and a menu you will not remember.
How the country actually sits
France is highly centralised and deeply regional, both at once. The train map flatters Paris. The kitchen does not. In Lyon you eat differently from Nice, and you are rude if you treat both as ‘French food’ in the singular. Sunday and Monday still close more shops than a visitor from a twenty-four-hour city expects. Read the paper on the shape of a day before you arrive on a Sunday night hungry.
Driving is rational in the Luberon, the Dordogne and much of Brittany, and a punishment in the centre of Lyon or Bordeaux. Take the train into the city. Hire the car the morning you leave it, from a station on the edge, not from a fantasy of parking under a cathedral.
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