If, like most of us, you are fed up with the awful summer weather we have and are wishing that you had a bolthole in the sun, you will envy Trish Purnell with her renovated flour mill in sunny Burgundy. Trish, a retired school teacher living in Cambridgeshire, with sons in their early thirties, had for a while been mulling over the idea of buying a holiday home in France and started investigating the market in May 2006. She chose the Burgundy area, not only for its good transport links making it drivable from the UK in a day, but also because it is an area which has not become a British enclave.  So many of our favourite holiday areas in France have lost their appeal with half of the Home Counties spending the summer there.

Even in the south of France you can have the odd wet day, so how do you keep the family amused?

Pack a rainy day holdall with jigsaws, board games, books, colouring books and crayons, play-dough and other craft stuff. Alternatively take a few simple recipes and have a baking afternoon. You can spin out the time this takes if you include a shopping trip for all the ingredients! Collect leaflets, fliers, entrance tickets etc and make a collage or keep a scrap book.

Before you go on holiday spend time on the internet looking up details of the local swimming pool, ice-rink and bowling alley so that you have all the necessary information at your finger tips. Failing that pay a visit to the local tourist information office to see what is on offer in the area.

I have a vegetarian friend who refuses to set foot in France on the basis that there would be nothing for her to eat. Her meat-eating husband asked me last Christmas to do a bit of menu-gazing to see whether her prejudices were ill-founded.

Vegetarians and vegans are certainly a tiny minority in France and generally not well catered for. When I was in Paris in April our hotel pointed me in the direction of a specialist vegetarian restaurant but to be honest it was more of a café with a hippy-feel and whilst OK for lunch would not be suitable for a special night out.

Much of the criminal activity in France that we hear about in the press takes place in the outer suburbs of the large cities where social problems exist. As a tourist you are unlikely to be in that sort of area but of course care needs to be taken just as at home in the UK.

Have your wits about you at airports and stations. People who are tired after travelling and busy struggling with suitcases make good targets for thieves. Ignore the taxi touts and head for the queue for the official ones. If possible keep your luggage near you on the train. If you have to use the racks at the end of compartments, secure your bags to the rack with a lightweight bicycle chain. If you are using the Metro in Paris, be aware that the lines serving tourist spots are most likely to be targeted by pick-pockets. A favourite technique is to grab a handbag just as the doors are closing so be particularly careful then.