2 – 29 September 2009 (27 days)
Trip distance: 2355 miles (excluding Home to/from Dover)
Trip cost: €975 (c. £877 ) – €36 or £32 per day
| Travel | Ferry | 75.00 € | |
| Tolls | 0.00 € | ||
| Fuel | 374.00 € | ||
| Parking | 7.00 € | ||
| Train/bus/tram | 0.00 € | ||
| Subsistence | Food | 165.00 € | |
| Gas | 10.00 € | ||
| Entertainment/Goodies | 230.00 € | ||
| Essentials (laundry, household) | 11.00 € | ||
| Camping | Wild | 11 | 0.00 € |
| Aires (or equiv) | 11 | 0.00 € | |
| ACSI Site | 0 | 0.00 € | |
| Camping Cheque Site | 2 | 30.00 € | |
| Other sites | 3 | 73.00 € | |
| TOTAL | Total cost | 975.00 € | |
| Days away | 27 | 36.11 € | |
For France we recommend All The Aires France primarily, and
for free/cheap aires
Summary
France is a country we’ve only previously driven through on route to other destinations. So this is our first attempt to enjoy France. Unfortunately the 4 weeks we had available aren’t really enough to see all of France, so we have clearly missed off huge chunks, and the parts we did see were rather rapidly examined before departing.
As such, this trip is a sighting trip leaving us knowledge of where to go and spend future trips.
Overall France varies between really very good, and rather mediocre. There is hardly any dire but there are quite a few exceptionals – so overall we’ll be back in France to see some more of it later! We were fairly uninspired on the SE corner of the med (bar Frejus which we enjoyed). We were expecting Nice, Cannes, and St Tropez to be wow places but in effect we’d suggest they are not worth the detour. The gorges and mountains in the SE were however exceptional and a huge surprise and are absolutely worth seeing in the summer.
We were fairly uninspired by the food and eating out establishments – in a lot of towns and villages the eateries were almost deserted and seemed to lack atmosphere and quality, and apart from pizzas we struggled to find places to eat out. We can’t comment on wine as this wasn’t meant to be a wine tour – another time 🙂
We also seem to be spoilt as a lot of sites may be “wow” sites for some people, but having spent a lot of time in Italy this year a lot of the French Roman ruins are quite poor in comparison. So if you like Roman ruins – see France before Italy 🙂
France does cater for motorhomes rather well though in some places we felt there were too many motorhomes. Considering we were there out of seasons we’d hate to see some places in July and August!
Overall an 8.5/10 trip.
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