This article is reposted from the WeChat public account of a reader in our WeChat group, 懒人 33 的吃喝玩乐. Original link.

Background

Last October, we suddenly had some unexpected time off. After setting aside enough time for quarantine before and after the trip, we still had a few extra days, so we decided to take the opportunity to head back to Southern California for a short stay.

If you’ve read Taking a Toddler to Tahiti During the Pandemic – Documents, you’ll know I still had some lingering frustration about the Tahiti visa situation. So while we were back in Southern California, I planned to apply for a French Schengen visa as well. There are already plenty of guides online for the French Schengen visa, and the required documents and application process are exactly the same as for the Tahiti visa—the only difference is changing the destination when filling out the online application form. I still had backups of the documents I prepared before, so I just reprinted what needed reprinting and updated what needed updating. Everything came together quickly, and my paperwork was so complete that the VFS LA staff member asked me, “Have you applied before?”

Because we hadn’t finalized our itinerary at all, but the visa application required one, I just bought a random flight, printed the confirmation, and then canceled it afterward. (Tickets booked directly on US airline websites can generally be canceled for free within 24 hours.) Hotels were even easier to cancel. The application process went smoothly, and when it came time for fingerprints, we insisted on submitting two sets, so there were no repeat issues like the ones we ran into with the Tahiti visa. We received the Schengen visa in less than a week.

Later, we decided to go during our child’s Christmas break after all. The last-minute plan was to leave in early January, but when we got the visa, we were stunned—the visa became valid starting on December 20, while school let out on the 18th. So our child ended up staying home all day on the first day of break, and we didn’t leave until the 19th. By the time we arrived in Paris on the morning of the 20th, the visa had just become valid.

Covid Policies (No Longer Needed)

You can check the current travel policy on the official government website:

  • https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/coming-to-france-your-covid-19-questions-answered/article/coming-to-france-your-covid-19-questions-answered?var_mode=calcul

Compared with our trip to Tahiti, France’s Covid-related rules were somewhat more relaxed this time. For vaccinated travelers, a Covid test only required an antigen test; PCR was not required. Young children did not need either vaccination or testing.

In addition to entry requirements, dining out, visiting attractions, and similar activities in France at the time all required showing a Health Pass. Under the rules then in effect, being fully vaccinated or having a negative test within 72 hours qualified you for a Health Pass. Children did not need one. I took care of this before the trip, printed it out to carry with me, and also saved it on my phone. For the latest rules, see:

  • https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/coming-to-france-your-covid-19-questions-answered/procedure-for-non-european-nationals-to-obtain-a-valid-covid-certificate-in/

To return to the US, travelers age 2 and up still needed a Covid test, but shortly before our trip, the time window had been shortened to 24 hours. That really stressed me out. Paris airport offered Covid testing, but our departure day schedule was too tight and I was worried we wouldn’t make it in time. Disneyland offered testing, but only for ages 6 and up. There were many temporary testing tents around central Paris, but we were staying in the suburbs on our final day. Many pharmacies also offered Covid testing, but almost all of them were closed on Sundays—and the day before our departure happened to be Sunday. All those unlucky factors combined made getting a return-to-US test much more difficult. I’d heard that a self test kit could also work, but my spouse felt it was safer not to take the risk. I asked the hotel about testing locations well in advance, and there was one pharmacy more than a dozen miles away that could do the test, so we had no choice but to make an appointment and squeeze the testing stop into our last day’s itinerary. If I had to choose again, I’d probably just use a self test kit.

Itinerary Planning

After subtracting the quarantine time before and after the trip, we only had one week to travel. After doing some research and going back and forth on options, and considering the language barrier, jet lag, and other factors, we decided to keep this trip simple and visit only Paris as a trial run.

Qyer travel guides are among my favorite trip-planning resources, and I used them as the main reference for choosing attractions. After reading through them, I had a general sense of the sights and the map, and then I booked hotels based on the locations of the attractions we were most interested in. This time, I needed to use up some free nights accumulated during the pandemic, and I also needed to maintain my Marriott status before year-end, so my hotel choices were fairly limited. For a first trip to Paris, though, most of the main attractions in central Paris are relatively concentrated, and staying near the Tuileries Garden–Louvre area is very convenient for getting around.

Next came itinerary planning. I hadn’t made a detailed itinerary in many years, but this time I dusted off my old trip-planning tool again.

It really hasn’t changed much over the years. One feature I still like is that it can automatically sort the day’s attractions by location.

Here’s how I planned this trip:

1) Mark all the must-see attractions for the trip on the map. For example, our must-visits included the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Palais Garnier, Montmartre, Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, Notre-Dame de Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Disneyland, and La Vallée Village.

2) Divide the attractions as evenly as possible based on area and hotel location. For example, we stayed near the Arc de Triomphe for the first three nights, so the first three days focused on the western and northern parts of the city.

3) For attractions that required reservations, space the timed entries out as much as possible so we wouldn’t have to rush. In my itinerary, there was only one attraction per day that required a reservation time, except on the 22nd, when Versailles was very early in the morning and the Seine cruise was very late in the evening, so there was no risk of missing either one.

4) Check the opening hours for every attraction scheduled that day. If something was closed on that date, swap it with another day.

5) Pay special attention to holidays such as Christmas. On Christmas Day, almost all attractions, shopping malls, and restaurants are closed, but Disneyland is definitely open, so I specifically scheduled Disneyland for Christmas Day.

6) Put the heavy shopping days during the stay at the last hotel, which saves a lot of effort when packing and reorganizing luggage.

7) Finally, weave in the optional attractions we were most interested in, especially those that were conveniently located near the must-see stops.

Our final trip ended up being slightly different from the original plan, mainly because we added a few extra shopping stops, which I’ll get to later in the trip report. Even so, most of this itinerary was still very packed for a family traveling across the ocean with a three-year-old. We barely had time for lunch, and several meals were just quick and casual.

The detailed itinerary is here. If you want to build something similar, you can just copy it into a new plan, which is very convenient.
MarriottFree Night

  • http://plan.qyer.com/trip/V2YJZVFkBz5TbFI9CmkNOw/?fromjournalview=1&source=share&from=d

Attraction Reservations

Once the itinerary was planned, it was time to start booking. In Paris, the main reservation focus is on museums, and during the pandemic many attractions required advance timed reservations for entry. Based on our actual experience, though, you didn’t need to arrive exactly at your reserved time. Sometimes we showed up several hours late and still had no problem entering.

To save time and hassle, I bought a 6-day Museum Pass（https://www.parismuseumpass.fr/t-en）. Strictly speaking, the Museum Pass may not have saved us money for this particular itinerary, but it not only eliminated the trouble of buying individual tickets, it also theoretically came with skip-the-line privileges at some attractions, though in practice the places we visited didn’t really separate skip-the-line visitors from others. I bought it directly on the official website and had it delivered to the hotel’s Concierge Desk, where I could just pick it up at check-in. Very convenient. Besides the Museum Pass, there are also various Paris City Pass products and similar options—just google it and you’ll find plenty.

The Museum Pass official website has a list showing which attractions require reservations. For our itinerary, I reserved these attractions: the Eiffel Tower, Palais Garnier, Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, and Musée de l’Orangerie. The Eiffel Tower and Palais Garnier are not included in the Museum Pass.

There are also quite a few Seine river cruise options. We chose the Dinner Cruise from Bateaux Parisiens, and you can simply buy tickets on its official website (https://www.bateauxparisiens.com/english.html). The 6:30 pm departure is said to be designed for Chinese tourists and is relatively short, so we picked the traditional 8:30 pm departure to enjoy the Seine views a little longer.

Transportation

We did not rent a car for this trip. Not only is central Paris congested, but the traffic is also very chaotic. In many places—especially roundabouts—it felt like there were no lanes at all, and drivers just squeezed their way through however they could... We actually could have rented a car for the last two days in the suburbs, but since our flight back to Seattle was very early in the morning, we skipped it to save the time of returning the car.

So how do you get around Paris without renting a car? Traveling with a child, I found this especially stressful. If you take Uber, you have to carry a car seat with you; buses and the Metro supposedly have safety issues; and while taxis legally do not require a car seat, that still did not feel very safe, plus asking the hotel to call a taxi every time was a hassle.

After a lot of searching, I found the G7 app, which lets you request a family car and even choose the type of car seat, as well as whether you need one or two car seats. I only found out shortly before leaving Paris that this is actually the city’s largest taxi company. Even though it still had plenty of annoying issues, it became our main way of getting around Paris. If you are not traveling with kids, in addition to Uber there are also Citi Caocao and Bilt, which are said to be much cheaper than Uber.

Besides taxis, we also got the weekly public transit pass called Navigo. We bought it at a larger Metro station near our hotel. Although I requested a Zone 3 pass, which covers all the main attractions in central Paris, because of the language barrier we were mistakenly sold the more expensive Zone 5 pass instead, which includes farther destinations like Disneyland and Versailles. From a price standpoint, that was not a great deal. Still, with a kid, convenience mattered most, and having the weekly pass made things much easier. While we were in central Paris, whenever time and energy allowed during the day, we took the bus or Metro every day—mostly the bus, since it is said to be safer and cleaner. At night, we switched to taxis.

In theory, getting a Navigo card requires submitting a one-inch or smaller photo, and we went through quite a bit of trouble for that. In reality, nobody looked at it at all... and we ended up bringing the photos back to the U.S. untouched.

Restaurant Reservations

Because our daytime schedule was pretty packed, we planned to keep lunch flexible, so dinner became the main event. If you are a true foodie visiting Paris, how can you not eat at Michelin restaurants? For Michelin spots, I mainly referred to the Qyer guidebook, and for Chinese restaurants I mostly used Xiaohongshu. The map below is packed with places I marked out. Most of them are food-related—I probably found enough for ten or twenty trips to Paris...

Most of my reservations were made through TheFork app, which was quite easy to use. That said, I am skeptical of its "Family Friendly" label. I booked the only Michelin three-star restaurant on the app marked as Family Friendly, and it turned out to be a flop for us... I will explain more in a later post.

TheFork does not list every restaurant, so if you really have your eye on a specific place, it is still worth checking the restaurant’s official website to see how reservations work. And of course, when traveling with kids, you still have to consider whether a place is actually family friendly...

One thing worth mentioning: dinner in Paris starts very late. Fine dining restaurants generally do not open until 7 pm at the earliest. Later I chatted with a woman at one restaurant, and she said that is just how it is—Parisians do everything late, and after dinner they go straight to sleep. That schedule is definitely not kid-friendly, especially for a small child dealing with jet lag. Daytime sightseeing also often starts early, so sometimes our child did not get enough sleep and became fussy. If you want a lighter trip, you may want to skip fine dining or cut back on morning activities.

Bilt

Jet Lag

For a short international trip, any one of these three things can add friction to your travel plans—and Paris had all three.

Let’s start with jet lag. There is only one direct flight from Seattle to Paris, and I do not think the timing is ideal in either direction: you depart during the day in one place and arrive during the day in the other. The outbound flight was especially rough. After spending 9.5 hours on the plane, we arrived in Paris early in the morning and felt groggy the entire first day. As I mentioned in Traveling to Tahiti with a Young Child During the Pandemic – Transportation, I think red-eye flights are best when traveling with little kids. It would have been great if there had been a red-eye option. To help our child adjust to the time difference, we brought melatonin, and it worked quite well—our child basically adjusted the same day. For the adults, because I had previously had nightmares after taking melatonin, I brought sleep aid instead, and that also worked very well. While we were in Paris, whether from exhaustion, the medication, or both, all three of us slept straight through the night.

Language

As for language, most young people in Paris can speak at least some basic English, but older people almost all speak only French. Even at world-famous attractions like the Louvre, the language barrier created significant obstacles for us. It was especially difficult when taking taxis. Drivers were often confused, could not find our location, and did not speak English. I would be on the phone trying to explain things, and sometimes it felt completely hopeless. Fortunately, most of the time we were still able to get by with simple English, so it was not as if we could not go anywhere.

Safety

When we told friends and coworkers that we were about to go to Paris, everyone immediately reminded us to be careful—which shows just how notorious Paris is for bad public safety. Because of that, I made the following preparations:

1) Dress plainly

2) Reorganize my wallet and bring only a small number of Credit Card cards (do not bring just one—someone I know had fraudulent charges while traveling, and it was a huge hassle)

3) Withdraw only a few dozen euros at the airport as backup cash

4) Keep my wallet and card holder in the inner pocket of my down jacket

5) Wear the backpack containing passports and other documents in front

6) As mentioned above, avoid public transportation after dark

7) Put all shopping at the end of the day’s itinerary, or return to the hotel after shopping to drop things off before continuing; in short, do not walk around everywhere carrying luxury purchases

8) Other than Montmartre, we did not plan time in other relatively less safe areas. Reference: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/33393769

I had heard that Paris pickpockets tend to dress neatly and look like office workers. Maybe we did run into some, but whether because of luck or good preparation, we did not encounter any pickpockets or robbers on this trip.

This post is more of a practical guide. Starting with the next one, I will move into a chronological travel diary and record our days in Paris.

Paris Trip Series

This article was originally published in 2021 and still contains some pandemic-related content. However, most of the tips and experiences are still useful, so it is being republished on this website.

About the Author

This article is reposted from the WeChat public account of a reader from our WeChat group, 懒人 33 的吃喝玩乐. The posts there are all original and very well written, so feel free to follow if you are interested.