When travel advisor Lindsay Fiege traded the tourist checklist for cobblestone backstreets and a sun-drenched Riviera promenade, she discovered that the France most people never see is the France worth coming back for.
At a Glance
France's lesser-known destinations, accessible via its efficient rail network, often deliver more memorable experiences than major tourist sites. Towns like La Ciotat and hidden gems such as Sainte-Chapelle offer authentic French culture, medieval villages, and unscripted exploration that resonate longer than checklist landmarks.
The sailboats were already catching the last of the light when Lindsay Fiege found herself walking the promenade at La Ciotat, a small coastal city on the French Riviera that most travellers have never heard of and even fewer think to visit. The waterfront hummed with the easy rhythm of a town living entirely on its own terms. Local restaurants spilled onto the promenade, offering fresh seafood and gelato. The sunset stretched across the harbour. It was, by any objective measure, a simple scene. And yet, Fiege says, it became the moment that stayed with her longest after she came home.
"The promenade also had all of these local restaurants with fresh seafood and gelato," she recalls, "and although it was very simplistic, it was one of my favourite parts of the trip." That word, simplistic, carries real weight coming from someone who has built a career helping clients design complex, multi-stop European itineraries. What she found at La Ciotat wasn't a highlight engineered for tourists. It was the texture of everyday French life, and that, it turns out, is exactly what she had been looking for.
A Family Trip That Became a Professional Revelation
Fiege travelled to France just last month, joining her family for a personal getaway that included a visit to her sister. The trip was never meant to be a research expedition. But for a travel advisor, the line between personal experience and professional insight tends to blur the moment you step off the plane. What began as a family vacation, one that wove together swimming in rivers, a stop at Disneyland Paris, and lazy gelato walks with the kids, quietly evolved into one of the most clarifying trips of her career.
The itinerary was intentionally ambitious, reaching beyond the well-worn circuit of Paris landmarks into lesser-known corners of the country. Getting there, however, required letting go of one preconceived concern. "Once we got used to the train system," Fiege notes, "it was so easy and convenient, and is such a nice way to travel throughout a country." That ease surprised her. France's rail network, she now tells clients without hesitation, makes even the most off-the-beaten-path destinations feel genuinely attainable, not just aspirational.
The Case for Getting Lost on Purpose
Beyond the logistics, Fiege came home with something harder to quantify: a felt understanding of what it means to move through a country rather than merely check it off. She describes wandering through medieval villages largely untouched by tourism, places where the stone streets and centuries-old architecture exist not as attractions but simply as the backdrop to daily life. The experience reshaped how she thinks about what a great trip actually looks like.
"Just having a day to even go off on your own and not really know where you plan to end up, but just to explore and see what's there, and feel like you're somewhere that is untouched, is a really cool experience," she says. It is the kind of observation that sounds simple on the surface but reflects something deeper: a philosophy of travel that prioritizes presence over performance, discovery over documentation. For Fiege, those unscripted hours were not gaps in the itinerary. They were the itinerary.
France, she is quick to point out, is remarkably well suited to this kind of traveller. The country adapts. Retirees drawn to wine, history, and culture find it endlessly rewarding. Newlyweds and young couples can hike the countryside and linger over long dinners. Families, as she can personally attest, can balance the grand sights with the small pleasures that keep kids genuinely happy. "It allowed us to give a little bit of something for everybody," she says of her own family's experience, and that flexibility, she believes, is one of France's most underappreciated qualities.
The Chapel That Changes Everything
If La Ciotat was the emotional heart of Fiege's trip, then Sainte-Chapelle was its most quietly stunning revelation. Tucked within the walls of the Palais de la Cité on the Île de la Cité in Paris, the 13th-century royal chapel is modest in size compared to the grand cathedrals that dominate most Paris itineraries. That modesty, Fiege believes, is precisely why so many travellers walk right past it.
Inside, the scale of what greets visitors is almost disorienting. "It is adorned in floor-to-ceiling stained glass that completely surrounds you," Fiege says, "and it is absolutely stunning." The light filters through fifteen enormous Gothic windows, each one a mosaic of deep blues, reds, and golds that transforms the interior into something closer to standing inside a jewel box than a church. "I think that it is a must-see that people must put on their list," she adds, "especially if they've been to Paris before and want to see something that they may have missed the first time." For Fiege, this is the kind of find that defines an advisor's value: not the obvious landmark, but the extraordinary one hiding in plain sight.
What She Knows Now That She Couldn't Have Known Before
Returning home, Fiege finds herself thinking differently about the conversations she has with clients who are dreaming of France. The popular instinct, she understands, is to build a trip around a checklist: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the obvious landmarks that anchor every first-time visitor's imagination. Those experiences matter, she is careful to say, especially for travellers who may only make this journey once. But the itinerary that starts and ends at the major sights, she now believes with more conviction than ever, misses much of what makes France extraordinary.
"Getting into some of the smaller, lesser-known areas really can make or break a trip," she says directly. It is her clearest articulation of a professional philosophy earned through experience rather than research. The train system makes those areas reachable. The culture makes them worth reaching. And the memories made there, away from the crowds and the tour groups and the selfie queues, tend to be the ones that last.
What drives Fiege most, she reflects, is the moment a client returns from a trip having experienced something they never knew to ask for. "Being able to bring these opportunities and suggestions to them," she says, "is something that can be the most memorable part of their trip." That instinct, to surface the hidden, to redirect the gaze slightly to the left of the obvious, is what she carried home from France and what she now brings to every client conversation that follows. With Nashville on the horizon for a birthday celebration, her next adventure is already waiting. But France, and everything it quietly revealed, will be informing her work for a long time to come.
