You can't do daytrips too easily without lots of flights or very little sleep, so hostels are the way to go ;-) If taking a trip to Paris, it might be worth (if possible) making a week of it, and going down to Toulouse via Angouleme (the countryside surrounding it is the most archetypal French...) then doing a few cities in Spain: Bilbao, then Madrid which has Goudi and is very different in feel, and Barcelona is its own curiousness (it's Catalan, the stubbornly persisting non-Castilian sect of Spain - "Spanish" as a language, leaving aside southern and central America, is Castilian). There are probably ferries across to Italy, there - Venice has to be visited. Then there's Greece and its islands, cities in particular being Athens, for the Acropolis.

There are guidebooks. I scrabble around here. ^^;

And no, it isn't quite phallic enough, is it?