The perfect Paris day-trip to dodge the crowds

The perfect French getaway is just two and a half hours from Paris.

Just an hour and 15 minutes by train from Paris, or two and a half hours by car – even less from Calais – Amiens is home to about 136,000 people, about the equivalent of Darwin. And like Darwin, it has a famous war history. Fought over in both world wars, Amiens, in the Somme, is the centre of remembrance tourism, surrounded by museums and Commonwealth war memorials. You can’t walk around the city – or surrounding region – without reflecting on the past.

Happily, Amiens is, as it was before the wars, a thriving city, full of life with magnificent heritage buildings. And travellers are again seeking it out as they look for alternatives to overpopulated destinations. It’s fitting, then, that it was home to the author of one of the world’s most famous travel adventures, Jules Verne. The novelist, who wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, lived in Rue Charles Dubois in the 1880s, his house now an interesting little museum. Just don’t visit around lunchtime – we were shooed away with Gallic charm while it closed for an hour and a half.

Still, it gave us more time to do what Verne loved to do – walk around the city. Amiens was transforming in his lifetime, with the arrival of the railway and wide boulevards. Elected to the city council, he even penned a vision of Amiens in 2000, called “An Ideal City”. As you wander along its grand boulevards, such as Rue de la République with its beautiful museum and art gallery, Musée de Picardie, you can see why he was proud to live here. However, standing outside his former home, with its tower and lookout, even Verne couldn’t have anticipated the volume of thundering traffic that would one day choke up those roads.

The city is proud of its creative son – there’s an enormous circus named after him, statues and a lavish tomb in La Madeleine Cemetery. Other sights include the World Heritage-listed Notre-Dame cathedral, a 13th-century Gothic masterpiece overlooking the medieval alleyways of the Saint-Leu district, now full of art galleries and cafés.

Amiens’ famous waterways are northeast of the city centre and you can take a boat trip through the floating gardens Les Hortillonnages, which have existed since the Middle Ages.

Other sights include the World Heritage-listed Notre-Dame cathedral, a 13th-century Gothic masterpiece overlooking the medieval alleyways of the Saint-Leu district. Picture: iStock.

Back in the centre, after taking a spin on the ubiquitous French carousel, we got down to the serious business of eating, and found Amiens doesn’t disappoint on the food front. It’s packed with pretty bistros, serving up Picardy specialities such as cheese-drenched stuffed pancakes and gâteau battu, a kind of long brioche.

There are lots of hotels in the city, but we chose to stay on the coast, in Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. About 70km away, Saint-Valery is a pretty little town on the Baie de Somme estuary, with a medieval centre and a long history – William the Conqueror departed for the UK from there and Joan of Arc was imprisoned in the town by the English. Now it’s a popular tourist destination, with a steam train running between it and the also-pretty resort town Le Crotoy, around the coast. Unlike Saint-Valery, which has a small beach area, Le Crotoy has long sandy beaches, good for families in the summertime. You can even walk across the bay, with a guide.

There are lots of hotels in the city, but we chose to stay on the coast, in Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. Picture: iStock.

It’s a lovely little slice of French life, full of boutiques, cafés and restaurants, such as the local’s favourite, Brasserie Le Courtgain, with its smart red frontage and the best steak frites of my trip.

Like all of France, it’s easy to drive around the region, and a car means you can stop for coffees in tiny, one-tabac villages. At the end of our road in Saint-Valery, I pointed out the little cemetery to my children. There, at the back, sat a small Commonwealth memorial with a scattering of graves. I explained about the young soldiers who had travelled far from home to fight, many with the tragic ambition of seeing something of the world.

“They never got to go home,” my youngest daughter said, sadly. No, they didn’t, but instead rest forever in this now-peaceful corner of France.

How do I get to Amiens in France from Australia?

Major airlines, including Qantas, Emirates and Etihad, fly from Australia to Paris. Amiens is about an hour and 15 minutes by train from Paris’s Gare du Nord.

Originally published as The perfect Paris day-trip to dodge the crowds