How We Afford Family Travel for Three Months

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When someone is brave enough to ask, “How can your family afford to travel for three months?” I am happy to share the truth: with advance planning, extended family travel can be as affordable as a shorter vacation. Honestly, I know of friends who spend the same costs on five days at Walt Disney World as our family spends on three months in France! Because I get asked fairly often about how we can pay for such a long trip, I want to share three tips that have helped us afford the cost of our three-month stays in France:

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Metz is a Must: What Makes This French City a Hidden Gem

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Metz is a beautiful city and a hidden gem since most visitors to France aim for Paris and France’s other large cities like Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille. Metz, in contrast, is a key city in le Grand Est (the vast east) and requires special attention to reach on its own. It’s about two hours east of Paris by train, and it’s only about 30 miles (50km) from France’s eastern borders with Germany and Luxembourg. It’s a city that has been established for thousands of years at the beautiful confluence between the Moselle and Seille rivers. Initially it was settled by Gauls and Romans, was once the capital of Austrasia (a Frankish Empire), and in the past two centuries it was twice occupied by Germans before France gained it back as a key city in Lorraine. (It seems that all of France has adopted a love for the quiche lorraine which originally hails from this region. The family who agreed to let us stay in their Metz home was kind enough to make this regional dish and keep it in the fridge for our arrival!)

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Our Experiences with HomeExchange for Family Travel

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During our travels in France this month, we’re staying in French homes that I was able to book using HomeExchange.com. We tried our first two home exchanges three years ago, and each time we have so appreciated this option for family travel! The surprising part of home exchange is that you don’t need to have a beautiful, large home in a tourist-friendly location for this to work. Having a lovely space in a desirable area is helpful of course, but you don’t necessarily even need to own a home in order to book a home through HomeExchange. I’ll explain the options in a minute, but first here’s a quick summary of the ways we’ve used HomeExchange in the past.

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Visiting France as a Family in 2021: Le Début

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Bonjour de la France. It moves me to be able to type those words. We had planned to visit France as a family in 2020, but 2020 dashed a lot of plans and taught us to appreciate what matters, didn’t it? I shifted course and decided to begin a medical assistant program this summer since I did not foresee that we would be able to go abroad. And yet in early June 2021, despite only recently easing some rigid lockdowns, the government of France announced that American visitors would be allowed in again. After discussing this with my husband, we decided that returning to France was a priority. I don’t know if I will re-enroll in the medical assistant program next year, but I do know that this timing is right. So here we are, having arrived this week, grateful and amazed that amid this global context we have been allowed to come.

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The Best History Theme Park in the World: France's Best-Kept Secret

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In Northwest France, one hour from Nantes, there's a history-oriented theme park that puts on the most amazing and original shows you can imagine. Le Puy du Fou has been voted the best theme park in the world several times (Thea Awards, given in the USA), plus it attracts more than 2.3 million visitors per year and has top ratings on TripAdvisor. So why have you never heard of it?

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