France: Seine & Loing Rivers Bike & Barge

Although you come to bicycle the Île-de-France and neighbor regions, enabling the happy combination of biking and barging. Our Paris One-Week Bike and Barge trip gives you idyllic days of biking crowned by a full day in the City of Light.

Home for the trip will be your barge, a neat little craft designed for the smaller locks and canals of French waterways. Cabins are below, on the lower deck, each has twin beds (no bunk beds) with private bath, while the upper deck houses the salon, a roomy lounge, cozy bar and the sun deck. These practical and comfortable vessels are well designed for their tasks. You will relish coming back to the same cabin each night, unpacking once rather than daily.

Arriving at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, you’ll be met and taken by bus to Montargis, where your barge will be moored. Is it enough to say that pralines were invented in Montargis? In the following days our bicycling routes will takes us through forested areas, to medieval towns like Château-Landon and through the lovely countryside with stops at places like Château de Fontainebleau and a museum of antique bicycles.

Breakfasts and dinners are all on the barge, but you’ll be on your own for lunches in convenient towns along our way, free to sample the local specialties. The barge chef buys locally, too, so you’ll be eating as the natives do. In France, this can’t go wrong.

The last morning bicycle ride is followed by what will no doubt be a new experience for you, arriving in Paris by barge. You can savor your barge-eye-view from the sun deck or the salon, and following dinner go ashore to see the city in its evening guise. The following morning we will go by Metro for a guided tour of Père-Lachaise, cemetery of the famous and final home for countless illustrious cultural and political leaders. Travel to the center of the city where you’ll be on your own and faced with the agreeable prospect of several hours to spend enjoying Paris before joining your fellow cyclists for our farewell dinner on the barge. You’ll be transported to Charles de Gaulle Airport the following morning.