Tour hidden Paris ...in a classic 2CV

WE RECENTLY featured day trips north and south of Paris’s classic tourist centre. This week we head east and west.

EAST: Once a hunting wood outside the city, today Bois de Vincennes is an enormous 2,500-acre park, Paris’s biggest, and easily reached by Metro Line 1. The latest attractions here include segway tours and a parkour course, where you can watch locals show off their jumping and climbing skills.

And what could be cooler than chilling with jazz? Catch the Paris Jazz Festival in the park from June 29 to September 7. For refreshment, dine on scallops with clemantines or home-made duck pâté under the vines at Le Chalet des

Isles belle epoque restaurant. lechaletdesiles.com

WEST: Why not take a guided tour in a classic French 2CV car (parisauthentic.com/en). Bouncing over cobbles, your driver will take you to Bois de Boulogne’s lakes and gardens. Oh, and visit the Parc Andre Citroen on the site of the original 1915 Citroen factory.

Do stop at the spectacular Louis Vuitton art gallery designed by Frank Gehry. With its huge glass ‘sails’, the building is said to have cost threequarters of a billion pounds. Thankfully the entry price is €2 (fondationlouisvuitton.fr). There’s more period art, furniture and design at the Museum of the Thirties, which includes a gallery of Paul Landowski, sculptor of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer. Guides offer walking tours of Art Deco houses nearby, including several by Le Corbusier and a triangular house designed to look like a boat.

Nearby, eccentric 1930s banker Albert Kahn’s gardens have opened after a lengthy restoration. Many represent countries he visited, including a dense French forest and a Japanese water garden.