My family and I traveled to Paris and northern France (Normandy and Brittany) for the first week of the Tour de France in July 2025. Here’s what we discovered:
Stage 1: Lille, July 5, 2025
We flew into Paris the day before the stage (July 4) and spent some time seeing sights in the city (you know the ones). We stayed at an airport hotel because it was on the north side of Paris, closest to Lille, about two hours further north.
The next morning, July 5, we took the shuttle from the hotel back to Charles de Gaulle to pick up the rental car. First things first (and I’m aware of how this makes us sound like country mice in the big city), the rental cars at Charles de Gaulle Airport are poorly marked and hard to find. So, if you’re thee and looking for them, here are tips. Scope them out before you arrive:
The terminals from 2A to 2F are U-shaped. The car rentals are in the middle, ground level, outdoors (ours was outside 2C).
Terminal 1, which we didn’t visit, is circular and allegedly has its own car rental area on the arrivals level, between Gates 24 and 30. Terminal 3 does not have a car rental area, so you have to go to Terminals 1 or 2. The airport staff are very friendly but not good with directions, possibly due to a language barrier.
If the extent of my explanation of where the rental cars are seems long, you’re catching on to the fact that we had enough trouble finding our rental agency that we were a little late getting the car. Once we had it, we blazed to Lille and arrived ~10 min before the Grande Departe. Using the Tour de France app (which is pretty awesome), we tried to find the address in town of the race and parked. But we just missed it.
Undeterred, we stayed in Lille for the day and had an awesome time. Beware that bathrooms in France are hard to come by. I counted eight port-a-potties at the Grande Departe for (conservatively) 100,000 people. But they were clean and functional. We eventually learned to dehydrate (by American standards) to avoid needing bathroom breaks.
I’ve heard the guys on the Cycling Podcast joke in the past about how much French restaurants seem to enjoy closing the door in your face as you try to catch a late lunch or supper. I thought they were exaggerating, but it’s true. We tried to get lunch around 2 pm in Lille at a restaurant district right next to the start/finish, but we were persistently turned away. This was a stark difference to America, where you can imagine an extra 100,000 people in town causing restaurants to hire staff and stay open late. Work-life balance, I guess.
With the help of Google Maps, we eventually found a little sandwich shop that served us for an astonishingly low price. But this theme would recur throughout the trip. If the clock strikes 2 pm (or 7 pm in the evening) and you don’t have a seat in a restaurant, it’s an emergency. We ended up eating at McDonald’s four times in 10 days, not because we were lovin’ it, but because we weren’t capable of planning our meals. Also, McDonald’s has ice for drinks and clean, available bathrooms. (I felt very American typing that sentence.)
We hung around Lille, took pictures of the team buses, talked to locals (along with some Aussies and Brits; Lille is very easy to reach from London by train), and waited for the sprint finish. The caravan came by, and we got a keychain, a Krys hat, and some coffee. We were cheering for more Biniam Girmay magic, but it didn’t happen. Jasper Phillipsen took the stage. The Eritreans partied hard after the stage anyway.
We had distant fantasies of meeting a rider or two after the stage, but we learned quickly that buses and riders leave immediately after the stage. The stage winners and jersey winners stay long enough to get their awards, but just.
Pro tip: use the TdF app and try to get where you’re going ~3 hours before the riders are scheduled to come through so you can see the caravan. More on that to come.
We stayed in Lille for the night and, after a scare that we might not find dinner (see above), had pizza at about 10 pm. The late sunset and jet lag really had our schedules messed up.