France - your experience of it
Posted: 26 Sep 2010, 13:59
Long post, but hopefully of some use to folks wanting to do France for the first time. Perhaps other people could add their experiences?
Thought I’d jot down our very recent experiences of taking our 1984 Devon 1.9 WBX to France for a 10 day trip.
Instead of doing lots of driving touring around Europe, we thought we’d base ourselves in one area – this being the Loire region near to Tours.
As we live in Kent, we did the Dover - Calais route with Sea France 1hr 15mins, £72 return. 16th Sep - 25th Sep
We arrived in the town of Saumur in between Angers and Tours after 7 hours and 350 miles from Calais. This was essentially driving between 60 – 65mph down the toll motorways with a couple of breaks/stops. The motorways are relatively traffic free so although quite boring, it was an easy drive. The tolls came to around 55 Euros.
We spent the first 3 nights in Saumur, a campsite on an island in the middle of the river, 10 mins walk from the town centre. 18 euros per night without electric hook up turned out to be expensive. but the site had a nice swimming pool and was quiet in mid September. Now the bad bit. On the first night, the campsite had some unwelcomed visitor/s who broke into a number of caravans and sadly one T25 (not us though). They cut a hole in the T25’s pop top (Westfalia I think) , reached in and found keys and purse on the shelf there (how they knew they were there I don’t know). According to the owners they then used the keys to open the drivers door (still with the occupants inside). They took all money wallets etc but then left the keys to the van under the front wheel. They did this to some caravans and their awnings also (don’t know the full details though).
Putting this in perspective, yes it was unfortunate but everyone we spoke to over the holiday had never experienced this before in France (only heard rumours of it occurring like we had). It didn’t put us off though and we stayed at that campsite for two more nights.
One of the day trips we did from the site was a train ride from Saumur to Tours for the day. Oddly there were only about 3 trains per day and it was expensive 43 Euros return for two of us – a journey of about 40 mins.
We then went to Chinon (about 20 miles to the East) for 2 nights and did some cycling (great traffic free cycle ways) to Candy St Martin and Montsoreau.
Lovely town and chateaux, also.
We then moved further East (approx 60 miles) to meet up with some T25 friends at Bracieux near Chambord Chateaux for one night.
Both of us then travelled back West by 30 miles to Amboise. We stayed here for two nights. Again nice Chateaus and Leonardo Da Vinci museum. Also a fantastic cave/wine tasting place on the other side of the river directly opposite the campsite with wines going back as far as 1921. Lovely lady who spoke English and gave the four of us a great tour around.
With our friends, we decided to break the journey up on the way back to Calais and took two days instead of one day to cover the 350 miles. Their van had some serious knocking noises from the one of the drive shafts so we took it easy running between 50 and 55mph on the toll roads. We stopped at Eu, just up the coast from Dieppe. This was a lovely campsite with only us on it, it seemed! Nice town – all good for a one-nighter especially at 8 Euros! Le Treport is also worth a visit with their brand new and free cliff railway (where do the French get all of their money from??).
Final day we tracked up the coast for a while (some nice coastal towns and again excellent cycle routes which we must visit more next time) and eventually to Calais.
What was good:
The weather, one day it was 26C – and this was late September.
The campsites and their facilities were very quiet.
Cycle networks and provisions for cyclists - excellent.
French road surfaces (generally)
Plenty of campsites and good signposts to them
Municipal campsites are the best (in our opinion) one of them was 8 Euros per night and had the nicest location, grounds and cleanest facilities we’d seen.
What was bad:
Eating out was expensive in most places
Train from Saumur to Tours was expensive
Some of the Chateaus were expensive to enter (12.5 Euros per person.) I also paid 2.8 Euros for a 500ml bottle of coke.
Some campsite’s facilities were a bit below par (not so clean and tatty)
The dodgy incident in our first campsite ( a one off though we think)
Other items:
We didn’t book any of our campsites and didn’t need to. In mid September there was plenty of space at each one. Some campsites close in mid September though.
Fuel prices varied from 1.28 Euros to 1.56 Euros per litre (at the motorway service stations). A huge difference in prices. (French petrol smells funny BTW)
We didn’t take a power hook up and just used the leisure battery and gas fridge.
Some nights were cold so we bought an extra duvet from a supermarket.
We didn’t take an awning but did sit under our friends sun canopy when it was lightly raining one night.
We didn’t use any of the Aires.
We covered about 1200 miles all in – no problems with the van at all (apart from all the usual ongoing ones!)
Maps, we took a rubbish £4.99 map of France. However this was enough to get us down to the Loire where the Tourist Info places gave out free proper maps of the area – result! However my strong recommendation is that you buy a decent Michelin map of France at a decent scale.
Didn't see many other T25s but a lovely D plate bright orange tin top passed us on the way back to Calais. Took me by surprise as they shot past!
Overall
Overall our first experience of France in a T25 and a great one at that. If we did it again, I think we’d go in the first two weeks of September instead of the last two (just to get the better weather – even though ours was very good). The Loire region is very nice indeed and there is still plenty more to see there. We drove down there in a day which was no problems with two drivers.
Rustytop
Thought I’d jot down our very recent experiences of taking our 1984 Devon 1.9 WBX to France for a 10 day trip.
Instead of doing lots of driving touring around Europe, we thought we’d base ourselves in one area – this being the Loire region near to Tours.
As we live in Kent, we did the Dover - Calais route with Sea France 1hr 15mins, £72 return. 16th Sep - 25th Sep
We arrived in the town of Saumur in between Angers and Tours after 7 hours and 350 miles from Calais. This was essentially driving between 60 – 65mph down the toll motorways with a couple of breaks/stops. The motorways are relatively traffic free so although quite boring, it was an easy drive. The tolls came to around 55 Euros.
We spent the first 3 nights in Saumur, a campsite on an island in the middle of the river, 10 mins walk from the town centre. 18 euros per night without electric hook up turned out to be expensive. but the site had a nice swimming pool and was quiet in mid September. Now the bad bit. On the first night, the campsite had some unwelcomed visitor/s who broke into a number of caravans and sadly one T25 (not us though). They cut a hole in the T25’s pop top (Westfalia I think) , reached in and found keys and purse on the shelf there (how they knew they were there I don’t know). According to the owners they then used the keys to open the drivers door (still with the occupants inside). They took all money wallets etc but then left the keys to the van under the front wheel. They did this to some caravans and their awnings also (don’t know the full details though).
Putting this in perspective, yes it was unfortunate but everyone we spoke to over the holiday had never experienced this before in France (only heard rumours of it occurring like we had). It didn’t put us off though and we stayed at that campsite for two more nights.
One of the day trips we did from the site was a train ride from Saumur to Tours for the day. Oddly there were only about 3 trains per day and it was expensive 43 Euros return for two of us – a journey of about 40 mins.
We then went to Chinon (about 20 miles to the East) for 2 nights and did some cycling (great traffic free cycle ways) to Candy St Martin and Montsoreau.
Lovely town and chateaux, also.
We then moved further East (approx 60 miles) to meet up with some T25 friends at Bracieux near Chambord Chateaux for one night.
Both of us then travelled back West by 30 miles to Amboise. We stayed here for two nights. Again nice Chateaus and Leonardo Da Vinci museum. Also a fantastic cave/wine tasting place on the other side of the river directly opposite the campsite with wines going back as far as 1921. Lovely lady who spoke English and gave the four of us a great tour around.
With our friends, we decided to break the journey up on the way back to Calais and took two days instead of one day to cover the 350 miles. Their van had some serious knocking noises from the one of the drive shafts so we took it easy running between 50 and 55mph on the toll roads. We stopped at Eu, just up the coast from Dieppe. This was a lovely campsite with only us on it, it seemed! Nice town – all good for a one-nighter especially at 8 Euros! Le Treport is also worth a visit with their brand new and free cliff railway (where do the French get all of their money from??).
Final day we tracked up the coast for a while (some nice coastal towns and again excellent cycle routes which we must visit more next time) and eventually to Calais.
What was good:
The weather, one day it was 26C – and this was late September.
The campsites and their facilities were very quiet.
Cycle networks and provisions for cyclists - excellent.
French road surfaces (generally)
Plenty of campsites and good signposts to them
Municipal campsites are the best (in our opinion) one of them was 8 Euros per night and had the nicest location, grounds and cleanest facilities we’d seen.
What was bad:
Eating out was expensive in most places
Train from Saumur to Tours was expensive
Some of the Chateaus were expensive to enter (12.5 Euros per person.) I also paid 2.8 Euros for a 500ml bottle of coke.
Some campsite’s facilities were a bit below par (not so clean and tatty)
The dodgy incident in our first campsite ( a one off though we think)
Other items:
We didn’t book any of our campsites and didn’t need to. In mid September there was plenty of space at each one. Some campsites close in mid September though.
Fuel prices varied from 1.28 Euros to 1.56 Euros per litre (at the motorway service stations). A huge difference in prices. (French petrol smells funny BTW)
We didn’t take a power hook up and just used the leisure battery and gas fridge.
Some nights were cold so we bought an extra duvet from a supermarket.
We didn’t take an awning but did sit under our friends sun canopy when it was lightly raining one night.
We didn’t use any of the Aires.
We covered about 1200 miles all in – no problems with the van at all (apart from all the usual ongoing ones!)
Maps, we took a rubbish £4.99 map of France. However this was enough to get us down to the Loire where the Tourist Info places gave out free proper maps of the area – result! However my strong recommendation is that you buy a decent Michelin map of France at a decent scale.
Didn't see many other T25s but a lovely D plate bright orange tin top passed us on the way back to Calais. Took me by surprise as they shot past!
Overall
Overall our first experience of France in a T25 and a great one at that. If we did it again, I think we’d go in the first two weeks of September instead of the last two (just to get the better weather – even though ours was very good). The Loire region is very nice indeed and there is still plenty more to see there. We drove down there in a day which was no problems with two drivers.
Rustytop
