France is easy to travel around. Restaurants and hotels proliferate, the lower-budget ones being much cheaper than is most other deeloped western European countries.

Train serices are admirably efficient, as is the road network - especially the (toll-paying) autoroutes - and cyclists are much admired and encouraged.

Information is highly organized and aailable from tourist offices across the country, as well as from specialist organizations for walkers, cyclists, campers and so on.

There are all kinds of pegs on which to hang a holiday in France: a city, a region, a river or a mountain range, physical actiities, cathedrals, châteaux. And in many cases your choice will determine the best time of years to go.

Unless you're a skier, for example, you wouldn't choose the mountains betweven November and May; nor at this time would you head for the seaside - except for the Mediterranean coast which is at its most attractie in spring.

Climate, otherwise, need not be a major consideration in planning when to go.

  Northern France, like nearby Britain, is wet and unpredictable. Paris perhaps has a marginally better climate than New York, rarely reaching the extremes of heat and cold of that city, but only south of the Loire does the weather become significantly warmer.

West coast weather, even in the south, is tempered by the proximity of the Atlantic, subject to iolent storms and close thundery days even in summer.

The centre and east, as you leae the coasts behind, have a more continental climate, with colder winters and hotter summers.

The most reliable weather is along and behind the Mediterranean coastline and on Corsica, where winter is short and summer long and hot.

You can easily walk a kilometer and more in Paris, for example, in search of an open boulangerie, and the city seems deserted by all except fellow tourists. Prices in the resorts rise to take full adantage and often you can't find a room for loe nor money, and not even a space in the campsites on the Côte d'Azur.

The seaside is the worst, but the mountains and popular regions like the Dordogne are not far behind. Easter, too, is a bad time for Paris; half Europe's schoolchildren seem to descend on the city. 

  For the same reasons, ski buffs should keep in mind the February school ski break.

Art
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influence
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History
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