A review of An Hour from Paris by Annabel Simms, a guide to daytrips from Paris within an hour of the city.
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After nearly 20 years of travel writing in France, I’m happy to say that there are plenty of notable towns and villages and landscapes I’ve never visited. Why happy? Because after all these years I still get to feel the sense of discovery and adventure that comes with exploring someplace for the first time.
Annabel Simms has been at it a long time, too, long enough to have ventured well off the tourist trails but still within quick reach of the world’s number one tourist destination city. The result of those wanderings is “An Hour From Paris,” an outstanding, intensely practical, open-your-eyes guide to lesser known towns and villages within an easy train ride of Paris. First published in 2002, the book’s fully revised second edition is now available.
In 20 destinations/chapters, half of which are little known, Simms describes in nearly obsessive detail unhurried walking tours that will make even oft-return travelers and residents feel like first-time wanderers. As a bone to first-time visitors, a brief twenty-first chapter entitled “On the Tourist Trail” mentions well-known sights such as Versailles, Giverny, and Fontainebleau.
he selection of destinations testifies to both the persistence of small-town and village life just outside the doors of Paris and Simms’ own sense of the pleasure of traveling near yet far. Or as she says of the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, “it offers maximum dépaysement (change of scene) for minimum effort.”
Testing the book in Poissy
I decided that the best way to judge the book’s worth was to make some minimum effort myself one sunny day and follow in the author’s footsteps in search of maximum dépaysement. So I took the suburb train RER A line 30-minutes northwest to the Seine-side town of Poissy.
I chose the book’s “Poissy” chapter, which also includes the neighboring villages of Villennes and Médard, because I’d never been there before and because even Ms. Simms is cautious about Poissy, calling it “a modest place, familiar to most Parisians only as the name of a terminus on the RER line service the northwestern suburbs.” I figured that if the author could create a stimulating walking tour from a place that apparently held such little promise then “An Hour from Paris” must have many secrets to tell.
I more or less faithfully followed in Simms’ footsteps, doing so quite easily thanks to the book’s excellent maps and the author’s flawless instructions. In Poissy I discovered the church Collégiale Notre Dame, which has remnants of the baptismal font where Louis IX was baptized in 1214 and a colorful Renaissance “Entombment of Christ.” The walk through the courtyard of the Poissy Toy Museum (which I didn’t enter but where Ms. Simms clearly enjoyed herself) was enchanting. I saw the Villa Savoye, which was designed by Le Corbusier in 1929. To the contemporary eye the villa may resemble a small generic office building near a strip mall, but it was once considered a wondrous example of chic avant-garde eurotrash. One needn’t have a particular interest in any of these three sights to enjoy the diversity of the walk, a walk that’s far enough off the beaten track that the villa now stands across the street from a low-income housing project while the Toy Museum is across the street from a high-security prison.
I’d been in Poissy for less than two hours but already my walk was full of discreet, worthwhile, and varied sights and scenery. That’s when the real dépaysement began.
The author’s guidance now took me into greenery and out of Poissy on a Seine-side walk to the villages of Villennes then Médard. I was led, by suggestion or opportunity, to stand on a bridge overlooking a branch of the Seine, to “stroll down a private, peaceful and pretty, [that] leads past houses whose gardens stretch to the water’s edge,” to admire a hedge of firethorns in full bloom, to sit in a café in front of “the striking 11th-century church,” to visit the house that Zola bought in 1878 and where he lived “for about eight months of the year until his death 24 years later,” and to “make a nostalgic detour to reach the river,” where I sat above the riverbank in restaurant-café that is “the only source of food and drink in Médan and is open sporadically, depending on the whim of the owners, a retired couple.”
I don’t know if I’d call that last detour nostalgic, but my afternoon in Ms. Simms’ footsteps was entirely delightful, full of discovery, and leisurely paced, especially since that retired couple’s “whim” corresponded with my own. (See how I followed in her footsteps.)
Getting to know the GPS lady
In text and in maps “An Hour From Paris” gets you exactly where you need to go to enjoy the particular area under exploration. Simms’ writing is impeccably clear. Hers is the voice of your GPS. But this GPS lady isn’t satisfied with staying in the background. Occasionally, out of the blue, she will let you know that she is not simply working by satellite but has actually been here.
Here, for example, is a delicious line from a description of the village of Andrésy: “… continue along the river as far as the Rue de Trélan. There is a little jetty with an electric bell to the right which you press to summon the small speedboat opposite…There is a little riverside garden in which you can eat outside in the summer (where I saw a red squirrel) and the tiled floor, lace curtains framing the river and the old-fashioned oak furniture make for a cosy retreat inside.”
I just love that red squirrel that scampered into the text. It’s as though you’re driving down the highway and the GPS lady, after so accurately telling you to turn left, bear right, and continue straight for 2 miles, suddenly whispers, “Look, there’s a deer!”
Such asides are infrequent, once or twice per chapter, but after coming across several of them I found myself wondering who this GPS lady really is. The author’s bio simply states “Annabel Simms is a Londoner who has lived in Paris since 1991. She is a freelance writer and English teacher.” However, little by little, often subtly, perhaps unintentionally, the GPS lady reveals herself to be more than the unerring voice of practicality.
Annabel Simms is at times:
- a proper Englishwoman: “It invariably has a calming effect on the nerves.”
- an intrepid traveler: “The gate is to stop cars, not pedestrians, so if it is closed simply scramble up the railway embankment around it and down on the other side.”
- a wistful observer: “The atmosphere is remote and mysterious… even on a sunny day when children are playing on the lawn.”
- a what-the-hell participant: “I expected to be bored, but was fascinated and ended up pressing buttons to make the trains move and trying out a 19th-century fortune-teller’s board, remarkable accurate in its prediction.” (That’s at the aforementioned Poissy Toy Museum. What, I wonder, did the fortune-teller’s board so accurately predict?)
- a frustrated naturalist: “You could continue along the river instead of crossing the main road at this point, but although the walk is quiet and very pretty (I saw yellow irises growing by the water and a friend reports seeing a green woodpecker there) the gate through to the car park further on is sometimes locked and you have to continue for another half-kilometre before you can cross the road.” (Don’t you just love those irises and the gratuitous green woodpecker?)
- a slumming aristocrat: “It’s always fun to take a ferry, especially when it is free, but I must confess that I found the ‘parc naturel’ a trifle disappointing.”
- a writer with an obsession for detail: “Take the Rue Dr Plichon on the right, which becomes Rue du Moulin. It leads down to the river and the main footbridge to the islands. Turn right into the Chemin du Bras du Chapitre and follow the riverside path until you come to no. 13 just past the corner of the Rue Robert Legeay.”
- and an urbanite longing for solitude: “The great attraction of a visit to Champs is the fact that… few people actually stop off there…”
- hungry for nature: “However, it is very easy to get lost in the wilder, un-signposted paths between Maison de Sylvie and the Hameau, although you might see a deer bounding past, as I did.”
- and oh so glad to be out of the city: “As very few visitors seem to know about the existence of this station, your detour will bring you into contact with local people who treat you with a warmth you can only dream of in Paris.”
Most guidebooks these days are simply spiritless attempts to find a marketing niche or to promote an attitude, but “An Hour From Paris” appears to come straight from the heart of the its author. For all its GPS-like practicality, the voice behind this book is that of an inquisitive and quirky traveler who truly wishes us well in our soft adventures in suburban Paris. To judge from my visit to Poissy (I saw a magpie there), that voice is well worth following.
An Hour from Paris by Annabel Simms.
© 2009, Gary Lee Kraut