Pre-Tour
After our first Rick Steves Tour (Heart of Ireland in 7 Days) in 2024, my husband Henry and I (Dot) knew that we wanted to schedule another adventure. Shortly after we returned from Ireland, we signed up for the Rick Steves Paris & The Heart of France tour in the summer of 2025. I started researching possible pre-tour activities, we established our itineraries and made reservations where required.
Arrival in Paris
We arrived three days prior to the beginning of the tour and checked into our hotel in the Montparnasse section of Paris. We then found lunch at a nearby cafe and continued on, passing through Luxembourg Gardens on our way to Musée de Cluny-Musée du Moyen Age, the collection of magnificent medieval art, including the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. On a previous visit to Paris, this was perhaps my favorite place and I wanted to be sure to revisit it.
We returned to our perfectly located hotel to freshen up and then take a stroll to dinner. There were so many options in our neighborhood.
Chartres
The next day we took the train to Chartres to visit the Cathedral with the spectacular stained glass dating to the 12th and 13th centuries.
While there, we also stopped in the Church of Saint Aignan, originally established in 400 and, after devastating fires, was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries. The windows there were installed in the 17th century. The church reopened as a worship site in the 19th century.
Returning to Paris that evening, we took in the view of the city from Tour Montparnasse.
Armed with our metro cards and the Bonjour RATP app on our phones, we were ready to further explore Paris.
The following morning we explored Musée d’Orsay, the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. There was also a great exhibit of poster art.
In the afternoon we toured Palais Garnier, the historic opera house which inspired “The Phantom of the Opera.”
We also stopped in the Galeries Lafayette department store to view the stunning art nouveau stained glass dome.
Our morning adventure the next day took us to Père Lachaise Cemetery. We had expected to spend about an hour and a half there but we spent about four hours.
We didn’t see everything but it was time to stop for lunch and then head back to the hotel to meet our tour guide, Virginie, and our fellow travelers. We took a walk through the neighborhood and had dinner together.