Deauville

Deauville is a lovely little seaside resort on the English Channel in Normandy. It shares a train station with its closest neighbor, Trouville, and is an easy two-hour drive or train ride from Paris. Being the posher of the two towns, Deauville makes for a nice romantic weekend retreat for couples looking for a nearby beach town. The beach is very wide in both low tide and high and the sand is soft and fine-not rocky or pebbly like some of the beaches in the south.

Horse Racing

Besides the beach, boardwalk and posh nightlife, Deauville's main draw is horses and Clairefontaine, the horseracing compound. They've been racing horses in Deauville for over 100 years and Clairefontaine offers harness racing, flat racing and steeplechase racing. The majority of races in Deauville occur during the summertime, when the racing season in Paris is off. While many places in France can claim to be horse territory, including many places around Paris, Deauville is so intense about its horses that it's a twin city to Lexington, U.S.A. and Kildare, Ireland.

Film Festivals

Deauville also holds several other special events throughout the year that are worth keeping an eye on. Since 1975, the city has been host to the Deauville American Film Festival. This year the festival takes place September 5-14. The Festival normally shows several films (which are either free or reasonably priced), press events, question and answer sessions with some of the actors presenting films (last year there was George Clooney and Brad Pitt!).

Because the American Film Festival has proven to be so popular, since 2000 Deauville has hosted an annual springtime Asian Film Festival. Shorter and smaller, this festival has an Asian village for discovering Asian art, culture, and cuisine, several film showings, and a jury with prizes for those films entered into competition. Most films are VO with French subtitles, but some of them are shown with English subtitles.

Car Racing

Now in its 42nd year, the Paris-Deauville Rallye relives the roaring 20s. Classic cars and classic car enthusiasts gather at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and spend the weekend driving to Deauville and then partying it up at the Deauville Casino. (There's a bar at the Casino that fuses sake with a DJ with an oxygen bar. . .)

Where to eat?

Whether you're there for the beach, the film showings or the horse racings, you'll have to eat, right?

Deauville has several very good restaurants serving fresh seafood on summertime terraces, but on the other side of the marina in Trouville, you'll find a similar selection at perhaps a better price.

If you have a car, perhaps you'd like to drive just a bit, crossing the bridge into Trouville and then down the road inland to the small, quaint Les Landiers in Touques. This restaurant, housed in a typical Normandy building, serves seriously gourmet food like foie gras ravioli in truffle sauce.