A few years ago, when my daughter Helen was eight, the family took a villa for the summer near Sainte-Maxime. When Helen's school broke up in early July, we packed the car and were off. We took three leisurely days to drive down, stopping overnight near Paris and then in Grasse. The house was everything promised; very posh, with a small private beach and jetty shared with an adjacent villa. We unloaded the car and settled...

Rebecca felt a wonderful sense of freedom as she drove out of the gates to the villa the family had taken for the summer. Her husband deserved a break, so she was taking her eight-year-old daughter, Helen, to see her mother in the Pyrenees. Rebecca smiled. It was almost an eight-hour drive. Her daughter would never sit still for that long, so Rebecca had booked a twin room about halfway in Mirepoix, a picturesque medieval...