General advice - camping abroad.

Ponkle22

Have a look on Trip Advisor at cheap places to stay - you could ask on the forums.

I'm trying to remember the very cheap place we stayed in on Crete - It was up the hill from the beach and mostly dutch families there. there must be other places.

I have to say the advice about the tent heat in Somerset in the Uk is good advice - Why not ask on camping websites from others that have been Camping in Greece with a young family before you commit to anymore?

BlueC

Ponkle22 wrote: »

I have to say the advice about the tent heat in Somerset in the Uk is good advice - Why not ask on camping websites from others that have been Camping in Greece with a young family before you commit to anymore?

This is sound advice. UKCampSite has a good (very busy) forum with some real seasoned campers who will give you the benefit of their experience.

http://www.ukcampsite.co.uk/chatter/

knightstyle

Think about joining a UK camping club. Then get a Camping Carnet, this often gives a discount at sites and can be used for ID. Some camp sites insist on keeping your passport in the office so you do not have any ID when away from the site, but with the carnet you can leave this at the site office and keep the passport with you. It is an offense not to have ID on you in most countries, not sure about Greece. We also have a 12v Device that we put a midge killing tablet in each night so if anything gets into the tent it is soon killed, it is connected to the car battery terminals as the cigarette lighter only works when the key is in, might be worth seeing if something like this is available with internal batteries. The ones you light never seem to last all night.

davidlizard

Ponkle22 wrote: »

Ponkle22 PS: Please report back to us after your adventure so we all know if it was a MSE success or not - you can test it all for us.

Just got back. On balance the trip was a success. It did however go pear shaped as soon as we arrived in Greece as the numpties at Heathrow had forgotten to put two of our three bags on the flight. Fortunately the tent was in the bag that was loaded, so we at least had our accommodation so had to buy a change of clothes and some toiletries, but can claim these costs back. The 2 bags with our clothes in were put on the next flight so we got them the following day when they were delivered to the campsite.

Pros: Very sociable. Great mix of nationalities (I guess 60% greeks, 10% italian, 10% french). Good facilities on the sites (decent swimming pools, cheap restaurants, kids toilets, laundry, kitchens, freezers). No package tourists anywhere and met only 1 English family the entire time we were on the islands. No reports on any stuff getting nicked.

Cons: Very dusty, which the kids enjoyed rolling around in and throwing, which meant the tent got filthy and we did not feel clean for the duration! No electric hook ups. Tent pitches close together in places, almost peg to peg! Bit of noise in early hours with people returning to their tents. Long drop toilets :eek:. No air conditioning!

Total cost for 2 adults and 2 kids: Return scheduled flights £650, 3 ferry trips £135, 18 nights camping £350, 1 night in 4* hotel in Athens £72.

Total cost for 20 nights away for a family of 4 was therefore about £1200, or £300 per person.

We normally spend around €45/day when in Greece, but this time we spend nearly €70/day as we ate breakfast/lunch/dinner/snacks out rather than self catering. Therefore I estimate we spent an additional £125 per person on eating out 3 times a day compared to what we normally do (make our own breakfast and lunch, and 50/50 eat out/self cater in evening) which must be taken into account.

We also spent around £200 on camping stuff, but this can be reused.

The big concern I had was temperature - the tent did get warm during the day, but we were out of the tent most mornings by 9am and having breakfast, then spending the day on the beach and later by the pool, and in tavernas in the evening, so would not get back until 10-11pm, by which time it had cooled down. The front and back of the tent opens fully so we could allow the breeze which always blows in the Aegean to keep the night time temperature comfortable. We did have to cover ourselves thoroughly in Deet for the mozzies though. The first campsite had bamboo roofed areas which the tent was pitched under which did keep the day time temperature down. The second campsite we pitched under a tree, which meant we had shade until around 2pm.

I would say that whilst its a very cheap way for a decent length family holiday, 18 nights of camping is bit too long - in future I would camp for 10-12 days, then get a room somewhere.

DCFC79

Yes 18 nights in 1 location is too much, i hated 14 nights in same location when we camping with canvas or eurocamp but we did start to split it into 2 but over long period so 8 or 9 days in italy then the rest of teh time in germany.

davidlizard

It was three locations we visited - Milos (11 nights) and Serifos (7), and Athens for two nights - one roughing it at the airport on the way out and the other in the hotel on the way back.

We initially planned a third island (possibly Sifnos) spending around 6 nights on each, but decided that we liked Milos so much we stayed there longer than planned - this flexibility to change the schedule is another big advantage of camping.

Another disadvantage was when moving island, there is not only the packing of clothes etc there is also the faff of taking down the tent, packing it up and putting it back up again (whilst trying to stop the kids from squabbling) so we decided to keep the number of islands visited down to two.