Louise's Perfect Day In France

Breakfast In Beaune > Hospices > Lunch > Wine Tasting & Village Visits > Book Store > Evening Walk

"In every episode of the Loulabelle's FrancoFiles podcast I ask each guest to describe for me their perfect French day, so with well over 100 episodes now, I've heard about quite a few gorgeous days! I have often considered what my own perfect day in my fave destination would look like." - Louise Prichard

First Itinerary, City & Countryside

J'adore Paris, but there is also something about the little villages with their squares and local markets that just makes my soul burst. Every time I travel to a new place in France I declare that it is my favourite, that I want to buy a petit cottage and move there to live happily ever after! I love both city and country though.

When I’ve been road tripping around country France I actually can’t wait to get back to Paris, but when I’m in Australia it’s my memories of country France that keep my Frenchy vibes fluttering!

So the perfect French day in my imagination would have to include a combo of city and country... an early start on a fresh day in early Spring on the Ile Saint-Louis with a chausson aux pommes pastry and a chocolat chaud at my fave Café Saint Regis.

I'd then take the TGV to the Loire region because I love train travel in regional France. I'd head to Chinon on market day and meander around the fresh produce, making purchases to cook later for dinner. After a late lunch of escargots, I'd love a petit wine tasting in a cave during the afternoon before a home made dinner eaten al fresco with friends in the fading light.

A Second Itinerary Idea, Part 1

But… I actually have a perfect day that I experienced in Paris on my first trip there many years ago. It still sticks in my mind as I was struck by beautiful meetings with strangers twice on that day which have left lasting memories with me I’ll never forget.

It was my last day in Paris and I had no idea when I might return there if ever at all, so I had a number of my fave things I wanted to squeeze into the day. I went in the morning to the catacombes where I met a Canadian astronomer, Patrick, who was working at the Observatory in Paris for a couple of weeks.

He agreed to direct me to the Shakespeare & Co bookstore so we walked down the centre median strip of a long road which Patrick explained was known as the Paris meridian. We wandered through kids playing bocce, because bizarrely their school playground was in the middle of the road!

We went through garden strips and other snippets of Parisian life going on all around us. This long line, the Paris Meridian was the line that ran through the centre of Paris historically and was once the prime meridian for the world like the Greenwich line is now. Patrick explained how the Paris Observatory which was built about 1670 has a little hole in the wall on the first floor and the sun comes through that hole shining a beam of light along a lead line in the stone floor inside.

The place that the sun hits on the lead line showed the astronomers back then what angle to place the telescope on the roof of the observatory so they could monitor the night sky and the movement of the earth.

A Second Itinerary Idea, Part 2

I was completely fascinated by this story and my walk with a stranger. Patrick took me past the actual Paris Observatory building which is exquisite and then delivered me to the book store I was looking for! We shook hands and he left me there. But the walk along the Paris Meridian has always stayed with me.

I went and sat upon the first floor of the bookstore for a while overlooking Notre Dame and typing in my blog. I then did a little wine tasting in a store on the Ile Saint-Louis before catching the Metro out to Père-Lachaise cemetery where I had my second interaction with a stranger.

Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement and it is where many famous people are buried like Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison of The Doors, Chopin and Edith Piaf, but it was at the war memorial that I stopped to see the commemoration to the soldiers who liberated Paris at the end of World War 2 and that’s where I met an old woman.

She would have been aged 80 or 90. She was tending to the memorial for the French Jews who died during the war and she asked me if I had family in the war, if that’s why I was there looking at the memorial. My French wasn’t great back then at all but I was able to explain that my grandfather fought for the Australian Air Force in the Pacific.

The old woman went on to talk about her childhood as a Jewish child in German occupied Paris during the war and how she lost her family. Now it had already hailed on me twice on this day and it started hailing again while we were standing there so in the end, we were both drenched, hugging and in tears!

It was such a moving experience and beautiful lifetime memory to keep. So for me that day, when I thought I had planned to squeeze in a whole lot of tourist sights I didn’t want to miss, actually ended up having some interactions I hadn’t expected at all. I think those are the most perfect of days in Paris and even in France, when I connect with French people. Those are the moments that create lifetime memories to feed my Francophile soul.