French roads will be crowded and trains will be packed this weekend as the first wave of France's holiday-makers head out of the country's main cities.
At the beginning of this year, more than 14,000 people signed a petition urging the mayor of Paris to save the city from becoming “the European capital of boredom".
Festival season has begun in France. Not all of this year's events require you to spend days on end in survival mode in a tent. Then again, a lot of them do.
Wine writers and wine makers are predicting a historic vintage for 2009 from most of France's vineyards. As villages celebrate the vendanges, or grape harvests, there is optimism about quality.
Paris's glory days as the centre of the international artistic avant-garde may be over but millions of visitors, both tourists and locals, still flock to its museums and art galleries.
