Day trips from Paris
4 stopsBest: April to October. Giverny only opens in those monthsUpdated July 2026
Forty-five minutes by TGV there’s a city where the kings of France were crowned and where, under the streets, there are kilometres of galleries dug by the Romans and now full of champagne bottles. It’s called Reims and almost nobody coming to Paris includes it, because everyone goes to Versailles.
That’s the pattern of day trips from here: there are three or four places that in any other country would be the main destination of the holiday and that here get eclipsed. Versailles takes everyone, and rightly, but Chartres has the best surviving medieval stained glass in the world and it’s an hour away. All of this is done by train and without too early a start.
The route, stop by stop
4 STOPS- 01
Versailles
Louis XIV moved here in 1682 and brought the court with him for a reason that wasn’t luxury: he wanted the high nobility living under his roof, away from their lands and their troops, and occupied by a deranged system of etiquette in which the right to attend the king while he dressed was a prize people fought over. It worked for a century. Versailles is an instrument of control that happens also to be gold.
Two pieces of advice that change the day. One: palace tickets sell out and need a time slot, but the gardens are usually free to enter except on fountain-show days. If you’re tight on time, the gardens alone justify the trip.
Two: almost nobody reaches the Trianon or the queen’s hamlet, half an hour’s walk at the far end of the park. There Marie Antoinette had a fake farm built, with clean cows, to play at the simple life while the country starved. It’s the best and the worst postcard of the Ancien Régime.
- 02
Chartres
Chartres keeps around seventy per cent of its original thirteenth-century windows, which is extraordinary: everywhere else in Europe they were smashed in wars, revolutions and bombing. Not here, and for a very concrete and very unromantic reason: in both world wars, local people took the windows apart pane by pane, numbered them, crated them and hid them outside the city. Then they put them back.
The famous Chartres blue is a colour that hasn’t been fully reproduced, because the exact composition of thirteenth-century glass isn’t known for certain. And set into the nave floor is the labyrinth, two hundred and sixty metres of path, which pilgrims walked on their knees as a substitute for a journey to Jerusalem they couldn’t afford.
It’s covered by chairs most of the year and cleared on certain days. If it matters to you, check which day you’re going.
- 03
Reims and the champagne
Thirty-three kings of France were crowned here across a thousand years, including Charles VII in 1429 with Joan of Arc standing beside him, which was the entire point of her campaign: without a coronation at Reims, a French king wasn’t fully king.
The cathedral is thirteenth-century and on the front is the smiling angel, which lost its head in a 1914 bombardment and had it put back.
And under the city there are over two hundred kilometres of galleries: chalk quarries the Romans dug to get the stone the city was built from, which have been the champagne cellars for centuries, because they hold twelve degrees constant all year without spending a euro.
Several can be visited, and seeing millions of bottles stacked in a Roman hole is the best combination of two thousand years in one place.
- 04
Giverny
Monet lived here for forty-three years and painted the water lilies here. And you need to understand the order of things, because it’s usually told backwards: Monet didn’t paint a garden that existed. He bought the land, diverted an arm of the river with official permission (the neighbours objected, fearing the exotic plants would poison the water) dug the pond, planted the lilies and built the Japanese bridge. He made the subject first and then painted it for thirty years.
That makes the garden an odd thing: it isn’t where the work happened, it is the work. It’s an hour by train to Vernon then a bus, and it only opens April to October, because in winter there’s nothing to see.
Go on a weekday and first thing: it’s small and it fills, and the pond with fifty people around it looks like no painting at all.
Frequently asked
What’s the best day trip from Paris?
Versailles is the obvious one and it takes a whole day. But Chartres, an hour away, has the best medieval stained glass in the world, and Reims is forty-five minutes by TGV with the coronation cathedral plus two hundred kilometres of champagne cellars dug by the Romans.
Why did the Chartres windows survive?
Because in both world wars local people took them apart pane by pane, numbered them, crated them and hid them outside the city, then put them back. That’s why it keeps around seventy per cent of its original thirteenth-century glass, which no other cathedral has.
When can you visit Giverny?
April to October only: in winter it closes because there’s nothing to see. It’s an hour by train to Vernon plus a bus. Go on a weekday and first thing, because the garden is small and it fills. And bear in mind Monet didn’t paint a garden that existed: he built it first, pond included, and then painted it for thirty years.