A Week in France & Belgium; an Epic Road Trip

This road trip through France and Belgium provided us with an incredible experience, and stunning scenes. We planned it to be a little over a week, hired a car in Paris, and returned it to Lille. We used the Eurostar to get back and forth between London and the continent.

The greatest part about living in Europe is the ability to explore new places; and to have the draw of Europe to inspire friends to come traveling with you. And that is exactly what happened at the end of last summer.

What I learned, before this trip even began, was that when you have the opportunity to use friends and resources who know the area you are traveling to in order to identify the best possible itinerary.. use them to your advantage! I was lucky enough to have a friend from the area where we chose to travel who could make incredible suggestions for us; and it make a world of difference.

The trip was a great experience.

What would I recommend?

Mont St Michel was simply magical and has become one of my favorite places on the entire globe. The best advise I can give when visiting is make sure that you take the chance to see it all lit up at night, and explore every cobblestone and alleyway that you stumble upon.
Etretat was a place that I felt I didn’t spend enough time at. It is the very definition of picturesque, even Monet thought so when he painted the Cliffs of Etretat. This was one of the most breath taking seaside places I’ve had the pleasure to visit; the dramatic cliffs and coast made it truly remarkable. If you decide to go swimming here bring water shoes though since the beach is a pebble beach (but the water was divine).
Pierrefonds Castle is a brilliant place to visit, whether or not you are a fan of the BBC show Merlin (which used the castle for it’s main set for quite some time). Though this is a rebuilt castle (which I usually frown at) it still maintained much of the charm and elements of an ancient castle that captured the imagination. The crypts were particularly eerie.