Pretty much as the title says really

Is the additional cost of crossing from Portsmouth/Plymouth to Roscoff or St Malo justified or is it better to trade the cost for an extra day or two crossing the top of France?

I want to try and get to the southern west coast (near to the top of Spain) taking our time travelling down and back up, we will have about 20 days

Anyone have any experiences or opinions?

Anything welcome, fire away!

ben

Hi Ben,

we've done a couple of trips to that area and caught the ferry from southampton to le harve (usually cheaper that St Malo) using LD Lines.

We felt that the slow amble down taking a few stops on route was much preferable that a big jaunt on the ferry. We enjoyed driving around much more than spending, what would have been three days, on the ferry.

We can certainly recommend a few camp sites on route dependant on which ferry you get.

Hope that helps
Jez

Thanks for this, looks like we are going to go to Cherbourg then have about 20 days to mooch around so any recommendations would be really helpful

Ben

Hi Ben

Normandy beaches, north of Bayeux, Mont St Michael (small settlement on an island) and a day in the walled town of St Malo would be mine and the wife's recommendations.

We travelled south, stayed in Sarzeau for a bit which was nice, travelled on a small ferry across from Royan and stopped at Hourtin. Visit Lacanau-Ocean if you can (extremely busy though and packed full of buff surfing types of which i am not ). That sadly is as far south as we got as we only had two weeks.

At the time we had reduction boxes and thought the motorway would be the better route to travel, it wasnt. If you can stick to the A roads as they are usually much quieter and lovely to drive along. Far superior roads over there IMHO.

Most small towns have municipal campsites (brown signs I think) and they are ususally good quality and cheap (certainly recommended for single night stop overs).

Starting to waffle a bit now but it is a lovely country to go in a bus.

I am looking at sailing to Bilbao / santander in northern spain and then drive back up the west coast of france from the bottom.

I think the ferry is a day and a half bt i guess it s all part of the experience..

I will be doing this hopefully next year

We used a book by Alan Rogers. Its really good, top campsites.

It probably been said before but the crossing to Northern Spain can be rough (bay of Biscay) There is a crossing from Poole to St Malo via Guernsey, its a fastcat thingy, but i did see campers on it, i think we paid £300 last year for a car
We have visited Lacanue many times, it about an hour from Bordeaux on the coast there is a campsite called 'Le Tedey' which has its own beach on the lake and is about 3km from the sea, they hold surfing championships there at Lacanue Ocean it is a top place imo

I am off soon for a trip down to near Perpignan (first time to this part of the Med went to near Cannes before) including a stop to go into Paris on the return journey. We are hoping to get down in 3 days using non toll roads. We are using the Euro tunnel this time, used the ferry from Portsmouth before when we went to near Bordeaux. Sorry it is too many years ago since I last drove in France (other than passing through for Holland or Germany and Austria) to give much advice.

Terry