Paris with teenage daughters
 

Traveling the end of July and the first of August with wife and daughters age 16 & 14. Need help with an itinerary. Would like to travel on the eurorail. Can I do day trips out of Paris? Where would you stay hotel or rent an apartment on VRBO? Any ideas will be helpful.

Umm, how long will you be gone? Hard to tell without some information.

Parisbestlodge.com good apartments for me

Careful to pay with CC many scammers on CraigsList especially

Apartments are nice for a family if in a good area

Betterbidding.com good hotel deals for me from $80-$100

bidding Priceline recently for me the Meridien Etoile.

eurocheapo.com for day trips Chatres is nice.

hotel-collegedefrance.com is a well located cute smaller hotel

Happy Planning,

We stayed in a great apt thru vrbo. Great location and great price. Check it out:
http://www.vrbo.com/339804

99 euros a night and the owner is so nice, and the apt has everything you need.

How much time do you have in total? What are your interests? What do your teenage daughters like to do? Do you speak any French? Have you been to Europe before? What is your budget? Why did you pick Pris? We can't do much to help you out unless you part with some basic information.

And there's no such thing as "the eurorail." If you're traveling by train in France you will be using the French national railway system, or SNCF.

Eurail is not a train company. It is a travel agent that sells rail tickets in the US at very large mark-ups.

Unless you must have an overnight trips on a very busy day you are better off buying tickets from SNCF in advance (if you can commit to a specific train to get a discount) - or the day of when you get there.

Standard-variety teenage girls always like to shop, and like to visit busy parts of town where there are lots of other young people. Beyond that, it's a matter of individual personality.

You can make day trips to Versailles, Disneyland, champagne country, Chartres, Parc Asterix (many roller coasters, which many teens enjoy), or even the Atlantic coast (2 hours by car) out of Paris. It depends also on how long you are staying.

Apartment-hotels like Citadines are all around Paris and provide you with an apartment-like room that has an equipped kitchen and can accommodate four people (one master bedroom and a sofa bed in the living room). Renting an actual apartment may be practical if you are staying long enough.

I don't even know where to begin with Hanabal's post, but just a few comments:

You don't just "find your way to a train station and go to London." You need to find your way specifically to the Gare du Nord and take the Eurostar (again, there is no such thing as eurorail or euro rail). AND you should have purchased a ticket some time in advance to get the best fare.

A Paris métro card at 65 dollars, or euros, is going to be fairly useless for the vast majority of visitors going to Paris for a week. A carnet is probably what will be most useful, perhaps with the occasional supplement for wandering outside the central zones.

Sure, you can speak English - or Pashto or Tagalog or anything else - to people in the métro, but that most certainly doesn't guarantee that they will understand you or speak back to you in comprehensible fashion. You may get lucky, but that's all.

$20,000/week hotels? I'm sure they exist, but they are far, from the norm.