howsaker

We are flying to France the first week of June. Our kids are great travelers. Right now we plan on staying in Paris for 4 days, take a train to Tours, drive through Loire, up to Mont Ste Michel and then to Normandy. 15 days in all.
Are we nuts? Any suggestions on things you love, to avoid. Thanks.

MrNuke

Not nuts at all, but if you trip is for a total of 15 days, I might consider a little more time in Paris.

frogoutofwater

Try to spend at least 3 nights in each location, so that you can settle down a little. Normandy may be a little crowded in early June (D-Day events), so you might wantto avoid heading there too early, unless your purpose is to see those events.

Buy a good roadmap for France or the region where you are going to be driving. We did a number of roadtrips when we lived in France and the highway signs took some getting used to. It helps to have a general sense of where the major cities in France are, because there will be signs on the autoroutes that indicate e.g. Direction - Lille, Bordeaux, Nice. (Someone who knows a little about French geography, would find that terribly confusing, since those three cities are in completely different directions, but apparently this makes sense at some deeper level.) It is worth plotting your route on an internet service, such as mappy.fr (which we used) or viamichelin. Those services will specify exactly the autoroute signs you will see and what to do where. You can also elect to take routes that by-pass tolls. These routes take a little more time and gas money, but are often worth it for the scenery (and you do avoid tolls).

Two hotel chains that are worth checking out are Logis de France and Best Western. Best Westerns in France often include quite charming hotels (once independent, now part of the BW franchise). BW has a good booking engine with good, flexible rates (i.e. that can be cancelled at short notice). Logis de France are also often quite charming, at a reasonable price. They're a good option in smaller towns. The less expensive hotels in the Accor chain (which includes the top-end Sofitels but also the less expensive Mercures, Novotels and Ibis brands) are rather soulless, but can be found almost everywhere. Ibis is quite inexpensive (and soulless), but acceptable.

Lexma90

Several years ago, we took our son, then 10 years old, and a trip that has some similarities to yours. We started in London, took the Eurostar to Paris, rented a car and drove to the Loire Valley for several days, then dropped the car in Tours and took the train back to Paris, where we spent 4 nights to end our trip.

We all had a wonderful time.

The reason we took the train from Tours back to Paris was that we thought our son would enjoy another train ride. In retrospect, the train ride from London to Paris was enough, and he didn't find the train trip from Tours to Paris that interesting (neither did we). We should have driven that part. So unless your boys really want to ride the train, consider renting your car as you leave Paris.

In Paris, our son enjoyed the usual activities. We did not visit the catacombs - his (and my) active imagination would have caused too many nightmares, we feared! He and I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame together, learning a lot about the history of Paris in the process. It made our visit to Notre Dame and its tower magical. We were in Paris on a Sunday, and he really wanted to visit the bird/animal market. He liked that too, though I noticed that we saw pretty much the same collection of animals as we walked to the Louvre the day prior. I arranged our visit so that his first view of the Eiffel Tower was (on our first day in Paris) from an evening boat tour (Vedettes de Pont Neuf); that was as special as I had hoped. He and I discovered we love the pastry called a macaron, and made a quest to try a macaron from every bakery we could.

I thought he would really like the Rodin Museum, especially the statues outside in the garden. I was wrong on that; he hated it! The place has now become the butt of family jokes. In contrast, he really loved the Musee d'Orsay (he'd loved the Impressionists for a long time before this trip). On a subsequent visit to Paris, this was the one place he wanted to revisit.

In Paris, I really wanted to visit the market on Rue Mouffetard. From what I'd read, there are often street performers here as well. Neither my husband or son much liked visiting the market, or watching the street performers, but I really appreciated our visit there! While in the area, we stopped at the Pantheon. There's a huge Foucault's pendulum here, and many famous and important French people are buried here. My son wanted to go here to visit the tombs of Victor Hugo and the Curies, so we did that. I could have skipped the Pantheon, but he enjoyed the visit.

We also visited Sacre Couer, in Montmartre. DH and I had never visited Sacre Couer, in several previous visits to Paris, partly because we'd heard it was seedy and touristy. Well, I'm glad we went. The views were great, and once out of the main square, the neighborhood was charming. Also, we used the walking tour of the area from the Rick Steves' book, and saw a lot of places lived in or frequented by the Impressionists.

In the Loire Valley, we visited Chenenceaux, Chambord, Chaumont (I love this one), Cheverny, Fougeres (a good contrast to the others, because it was built much earlier, as a defensive structure). My son is a huge fan of Leonardo da Vinci, and just loved our tour of the house he lived in in Amboise; life-sized reconstructions of some of Leonardo's ideas are in a park on the grounds. It's used as a field trip for school groups, and it's a lot of fun for kids.

In the Loire, I thought our son would enjoy staying in a chateau, so we stayed in one that was several kilometers from Amboise. He did like the chateau - it even had suits of armor on the stairways. What we missed out on, though, was staying IN a town, where we could walk around in the evenings. We did stop several times in Amboise for drinks, and felt comfortable allowing him to wander around the various gift shops that were in sight of our cafe. We also ate lunch one day in a restaurant that's in a cave (us grownups had found the place on a previous trip).

On a much-previous trip (without the son; in fact, before he was born), we visited Mont St. Michel. It is very worth arranging your trip so you can spend the night there. We arrived in the early evening, as all the day-trippers were leaving. We had a quiet evening, then toured the site in the morning. We left mid-morning, as the Mont was starting to fill with visitors.

As you can tell, quite a few of the places we visited were keyed to specific interests of our son, in Leonardo da Vinci, the Pantheon, the Impressionists, and so on. While they were places that we adults wanted to visit as well (for the most part), it certainly made our son more interested!

I think your plan is doable and probably not too rushed. You could spend another night in Paris, especially if you'll be jet-lagged when you arrive there. We spent 3 nights in the Loire (2 1/2 days), and that was the right amount of time for us. While one-night stays can be tiring, especially with kids, I would think one night in Mont St. Michel would be enough.

Also - Asterix is a much-loved French comic book series (my son probably wouldn't call them comic books, though). I thought it was a delightful way to familiarize him with France; the books are available (in English) in bookstores in the U.S. or through Amazon.

Enjoy!

spinesrgn

We took our kids (10 and 7) to the Loire and Paris last summer.

Some of the highlights for them were

Chenonceau
Amboise
Tours
Da Vinci's house
Canoing down the Indre river
Staying at the Chateau outside of Tours (Domaine de la Tortiniere)
Tank museum (don't remember which town it was in but supposedly the largest collection of European tanks)

Give them some age appropriate books to read prior to the trip... they appreciated seeing some of the things they had read about.

frogoutofwater

Some Paris museums worth visiting:

Musee Carnavalet (the boys might like the scale models of Paris neighbourhoods at different points in their history)

Musee des arts et metiers (hard to describe exactly but along the lines of a museum of industry and design focusing on French contributions - sounds dull but lots of interesting exhibits and woth a trip just for the airplane hanging in one of the stairwells)

Museum of Magic (in the Marais) - very kitschy but fun for kids