Holidays in France - holiday properties, villas, apartments, gites and village houses

The port you use to leave the country and enter France obviously depends on where you live in the UK.The most popular crossing is the Dover / Calais, followed by the Portsmouth / Cherbourg or Le Havre crossing.

You can take the train, speeding down to the south of France on the new TGV line that stretches from the north of France to the Mediterranean coastline. The TGV is fast. You board at London Waterloo station, and within hours you are speeding through French countryside. You can take the train as far as Perpignan in the west or Marseilles in the east, hiring a car from one of the many national car hire companies. Check out the fares and timetable by clicking on the SNCF logo on the right panel.

There are now plenty of cheap flights to France from many local airports in the UK. You can fly Air France or British Airways but many people now choose to fly with the low-cost airways, picking up extremely cheap flights.

Ryanair fly from Stansted to Carcassonne, Perpignan, Montpellier and Nimes, with regular return fares around £100 - although you can easily pick up bargain tickets from as little as £25 return.

Easyjet fly to Nice, but for holidaymakers thinking of the area around Perpignan, a cheap flight to Gerona or Barcelona is worth considering.

Hire your car as you plan your holiday - don't leave it while the last minute. Europcar and Hertz usually have good prices.

Budget cars is a different story. A person at Stansted Airport was told that it was £224 for three days hire of a Fiat Punto- certainly not worth recommending as a 'good buy'.

You can either travel across and down through the centre of France, using the new bridge at Millau - the highest in the world, or, if the arrival port is Calais, down the AutoRoute de soleil - motorway to the sun, travelling via Reims, Dijon and Lyon, taking
up the A9 Laguedocianne at Orange.

Travelling from the UK by car means you really should make the journey through France part of the holiday and take a little time to see some of the beautiful countryside.

There are plenty of places to stay, from expensive hotels to the cheap and cheerful AutoRoute motels like Formula 1, B&B or Campanile.