France is easy to travel around. Restaurants and hotels proliferate, the lower-budget ones being much cheaper than is most other developed western European countries. Train services 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 available 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 activities, 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 between November and May; nor at this time would you head for the seaside - except for the Mediterranean coast which is at its most attractive 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 violent storms and close thundery days even in summer. The centre and east, as you leave 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.

The single most important factor in deciding when to visit France is tourism itself. As most French people take their holidays in their own country, it's as well to avoid the main French holiday periods - mid-July to the end of August, with August being particularly bad. You can easily walk a kilometre 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 advantage and often you can't find a room for love 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. And no one who values life, limb, and sanity should ever be caught on the roads the last weekend of July or August, and least of all on the weekend of August 15