travelling to south of france with caravan & children

cambridgeconsultant

Advice please!
We're thinking of travelling with our caravan to south of France 2015, we have 2 children 1 with Asperger Syndrome (ages 9 &12) & wanted to know the cheapest way. We went this year to Aquitaine via Portsmouth to Bilbao but very costly with ferry crossing. We are planning to go to Roussillon but the journey is putting us off already :-(

missbiggles1

Where do you live?

mgdavid

missbiggles1 wrote: »

Where do you live?

OK I'm game - how about Cambridge?

maman

We've generally go via Portsmouth as it's our nearest ferry port unless we go to Channel Tunnel.


Going at peak holiday times means you're unlikely to get a cheap fare.


What we do is to go away for almost three weeks but only stay at our destination for two. The other week is spent travelling down and back, breaking the journey up and visiting other places along the way. This is a group of adults renting a holiday home and staying in hotels on the way but I'm sure it could be done with a caravan.


Someone I know used to take an afternoon ferry and then drive through the night while children slept.

peachyprice

maman wrote: »

What we do is to go away for almost three weeks but only stay at our destination for two. The other week is spent travelling down and back, breaking the journey up and visiting other places along the way. This is a group of adults renting a holiday home and staying in hotels on the way but I'm sure it could be done with a caravan.

Yes, this is the way we have always done it, a few hours driving in the morning, a nice long lunch, a few hours in the afternoon and at our stop over destination by late afternoon, a nice evening discovering the city and a good night's sleep.

We've always done a circuitous route so that we stop a different places on the way down to the way back. This way it makes the travelling feel like it's part of the holiday and much less of a chore.,

knightstyle

If you or any other MSEer would like a discount on Brittany Ferries PM me and I will send you my code.
One thing to note is that the motorways down from Caen, St Malo are free till about half way down France.
We go to Vendee and Deux Sevres toll free.

cambridgeconsultant

Many thanks for the replies.

We live in Essex.

The ferry crossing was brilliant this year but just so costly, will pm for discount code, many thanks.

AlexMac

Another way to save on Brittany Ferries is to book early- we got a discount of about 20% by booking in Jan this year), and also adding in accomodation for 2 or 3 nights (click on 'holidays' on their site), when the price of the ferry/hotel package drops even further. You don't have to synchronise hotel and ferry dates exactly either (yes, I know you have a caravan, but when their 2015 schedules open, go online and try it- you might even find that a hotel room at about £50 an night for two saves more than that off the crossing )

holidaysforme

Brittany Ferries schedule are open up to August 2015 now. Most routes have been loaded on. Some very good prices as well..

scaredofdebt

We went to the south of France last year, about an hour east of Bordeaux.

We drove from the North East of England with our 5 children, ages 8 - 12.

:eek:

We hired a larger car as the 7 seater we have is too cramped for a journey of that distance if we wanted to retain any sanity.

Stopped at a Premier Inn the evening before the ferry at Dover (you won't need this luxury as your journey is shorter) - crossing Dover to Calais was the cheapest option for us and the further ahead you can book the cheaper it will be.

Driving down from Calais to Bordeaux via Rouen, Le Mans, Tours etc was fairly simple and cost about 100 Euros each way in tolls. It's supposedly 10 hours if you believe Google/Bing but it took us more like 14 hours but we did stop 4 times including once for a leisurely evening meal.

Recommend you get a Sanef tag for the tolls as this allows you to join to shorter/non-existent queues at the tolls instead of the "pay by cash/card" barriers that tend to have lengthy queues.

https://www.saneftolling.co.uk/

There are charges for this so read their website first but we found the time savings worth it.

Enjoy!