Off the Beaten Track in France: Lille, Rouen, and a Dieppe Sprint
Paris was always on the itinerary. But I have a travel philosophy that has served me well over the years — find a place a little off the main tourist trail, use it as a base, and discover what’s nearby. It opens up places you’d never otherwise find and makes the eventual arrival at the famous destination feel earned rather than rushed. So before Paris, we headed north to Lille.
HomeExchange: A New Way to Travel
A few months ago Joe and I joined HomeExchange — a platform where you accumulate points when people stay in your home, then use those points to stay in someone else’s. You can also do a direct swap with no points involved. I put in requests for several apartments in northern France and Lille was the first to come through. The Lille apartment completely delivered — top floor of a building full of character, with the stairs to prove it. Tall ceilings, beautiful windows overlooking the city, a wonderful lived-in quality that no hotel can replicate. Around the corner was Marché de Wazemmes, one of Lille’s great neighborhood markets — bread, cheese, local produce, all of it excellent.
Our second exchange in Rouen was an entirely different and equally wonderful surprise — 1960s and 70s kitsch, records of French jazz to play, vintage decor that immediately reminded me of how Kelly and I used to decorate when we were back in college. I loved it immediately, and the views of the Seine and the skyline from the windows didn’t hurt.
Two very different apartments, two completely different experiences, both better than any hotel would have been. HomeExchange is going on the permanent travel toolkit.
Lille: Food, Art, and More Notre Dames Than Expected
Lille is a genuinely lovely city — walkable, lined with cafes and shops and the kind of neighborhood life that makes you want to slow down.
Food was the highlight, and it remained so throughout France. Estaminet La Ch’tite Brigitte is a tiny, lively restaurant celebrating the rich comfort food of northern France, where reservations are essential and everyone waits outside before being seated all at once. You get two hours to eat, which turns out to be just enough time to work through bone marrow, beef stew, and whatever else appears in front of you. Rich, delicious, completely worth it.
The sweet shops were another category entirely. Aux Merveilleux de Fred — pastries, meringues, brioches, chocolates, counters of things you can’t stop looking at — left us wondering genuinely how anyone in France stays slim. We concluded it must be the 20,000-plus steps a day you accumulate just existing here.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts deserves more than a passing mention. It holds the richest art collection in France after the Louvre, housed in a magnificent Belle Époque palace — well worth an afternoon wander.
On the subject of Notre Dame — I had genuinely not realized before this trip how common the name is for French churches. I associated it entirely with Paris. The Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille in Lille is gorgeous in its own right, and it was the first of several we’d encounter.
Our rainy last day in Lille took us to nearby Roubaix, to La Piscine —an art museum housed inside a stunning Art Deco swimming pool, the original pool still intact at the center of the main gallery space with sculptures and paintings arranged around it.
Afterwards we warmed up at Méert, a beautiful tea house in Lille with a counter full of the kind of French pastries that make choosing the most difficult process.
Rouen: Medieval Streets and Joan of Arc
Rouen is a medieval city in a way that is not metaphorical. The timber-framed buildings that line its streets are actually medieval — centuries-old, well-preserved, still occupied — and walking through the city center genuinely feels like stepping back in time.
One such step back in time is the Aitre Saint-Maclou, a restored 16th-century gallery cemetery for plague victims, its wooden galleries decorated with carved skulls that have been there for five hundred years, creepy and fascinating.
On the first evening we sat beneath Le Gros-Horloge, a beautifully restored 14th-century astronomical clock set into a stone arch over the main street, with a glass of white wine in hand, watching the city go by. A very good way to arrive anywhere.
Rouen’s Cathédrale Notre-Dame is the one Claude Monet painted obsessively — over thirty canvases studying its facade in different lights across different times of day, now scattered across museums around the world. Standing in front of the actual cathedral knowing that is a particular kind of pleasure, made even richer by our visit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, which holds several of those paintings in its own collection. Seeing Monet’s interpretations of the very cathedral we had just been standing in front of, in the region where he was born and where so much of Impressionism took root, is the kind of full-circle experience that makes travel feel genuinely meaningful.
Visiting the Joan of Arc museum was one of the best interactive museums we visited on the whole trip. Rouen is where she was burned at the stake in 1431 at just nineteen years old — tried by an ecclesiastical court, convicted of heresy, and executed in the marketplace. The museum takes you through her life, her visions, her trial, and her death with enough depth and context to make you feel the weight of it. She remains a profound symbol of faith and resistance in this city and across France, and spending time with her story here, where it ended, is genuinely moving. What might have been, given a full life.
Dieppe: Seafood, an Almost Missed Train, and a Story We’ll Most Likely Remember
On our last day we took a day trip to Dieppe on the English Channel. We had hoped for sunshine on the beach boardwalk. We got mist and clouds — by this point a pattern we had fully accepted — but the hilltop castle was worth the climb and the boardwalk was lovely regardless of weather.
The ending of the day is what made it a story. Knowing Dieppe was famous for seafood I was determined to eat some before the last train back, found L’O 2mer, and had an exceptional meal — fresh fish, a giant bucket of mussels, frites. Throughout the meal, I looked at Uber and knew just when I needed to call it. Well, Uber was not the straightforward option I had assumed it would be in a small French coastal town. I quickly paid the bill and told Surae it was time to hustle.
What followed involved jogging through Dieppe, several unsuccessful hitchhiking attempts (one involved asking the police….), more jogging, Surae questioning whether I had ever played sports (no!!!), a lot of laughing, and arriving at the station sweaty but with minutes to spare. Surae went along with the whole thing without a word of complaint, which tells you everything you need to know about her as a travel companion.
Memories are definitely made this way. Now, on to Paris.
