Roosterbooster1

Chatter Static

Bilboa is the furthest down you will get and the closest to Toulouse it's 5 hrs from Bilboa to Toulouse, going to Caen or St Malo is really not going to help you journey wise, Le Havre would help a bit.

Personally I find the ferry the Fuddy-duddies approach to getting here, just get the channel tunnel you're in a camper van enjoy seeing France because taking the time to enjoy the journey to where you are going can teach you a lot and I really can't image why you would want to spend that long coup'ed up on a boat wish plastic english breakfasts when you could take a bit longer and sample what some of the regions you pass through have to offer.

If you can't enjoy travelling around France and seeing it then you shouldn't move here. You're in a camper van and can stop when you want to make a copper and have a kip, so use it.

cyrian

Le Havre is a good option with DFDS ferries (no frills) which is cheaper than Brittany ferries.
Ouistrehem is a very small port which takes 5 minutes to leave and once you leave the Caen ring road you have a good quality dual carriageway to Falaise where it becomes the A88 autoroute.
This then joins the A28 to Tours.
The faster route is Ouistrehem to Tours and the cheaper route is Le Havre to Tours.
HTH

Novocastrian

I wonder where in the UK does the OP's journey commence?

Roosterbooster1

We live in Newcastle bud

Novocastrian

Me too when we're not in France. :thumb up: When we're travelling to Calvados we take the Hull-Zeebrugge P&O overnight ferry. two and a bit hours Newcastle - Hull the boat leaves at about 6 pm which means we leave Newcastle after lunch, board at about 4:30 and head straight for the bar which is already open

We dine in the excellent Brasserie restaurant at about 7 pm (v. good food and a pleasant ambience) then a couple of nightcaps before going to our cabin and passing a comfortable night aboard. For us it's about 5 hours the next day on quiet autoroutes (A16, A28, A13) to our place. The cost varies dramatically by season, but so do all the other ferries. To drive from Newcastle to a south coast port is too far to comfortably do in one stretch (OK, we're getting on a bit and find the lorry traffic on the A1 or M1 to be too stressful). If we break that part of the journey with an overnighter, it costs the same as sleeping on the ferry.

Recommended..

grannybunz

Thats where we used to start from too! We used to take the Newcastle (North Shields) to Amsterdam or Hull /Zeebruges. We began to find the roads in Holland and Belgium were getting more and more congested and so always had to allow far more time than we should have to which got very frustrating. Now we don't need to because were are here permanently and because of our rapidly advancing years don't drive such long distances any more.
We still go to St Malo to take the ferry to visit son and family in Jersey but we can get a direct TGV service from Avignon which makes life much easier.
Can I suggest that, if you are considering settling anywhere permanently you think ahead for the future and try to find somewhere reasonable near transsport. Airports and railways. You never know when you might need to use public transport.

Novocastrian

Oooh. A Geordie hat trick!

scrubbedexpat056

I mentioned this on another thread. When we were looking for our house before we settled on Carcassonne I checked out train lines and we based our searches on those. Then I went further and checked out the train and bus timetables. I'm glad I did. I discovered how little distance you have to go from a main city or town to find the trains and buses few and far between, usually stopping well before 9pm around here. As grannybunz says, if you will need to rely on public transport now or in the future you might well want to look into it in more depth than you might have thought.

Roosterbooster1

Haha Its been along time since a geordi hat trick lol
Well after much searching and listening to advice st malo is looking the most likely, perfect for us 5-6 hour drive for us to Portsmouth ferry leaves at 8pm and lands 8am! So a nice sleep and few beers bite to eat etc, seem to be allot less toll roads down there aswell no interest in touringing North East France calais Paris etc spent more time there and the champagne region than I have hot dinners much prefer the south to live and see Reading on the brittany site you can buy a yearly membership that gets us money off aswell each time we book aswell so that's somthing to think about aswell depending how many times of year we come back tho compared to the price it is to buy,

notgrampa

As you have a camper I think the idea of "blasting" down the motorways in France defeats the plan to "see France".
When we travel back to the UK from the Charente we prefer to head across to Limoges, join the A20 until the tolls start then use the route national to Orleans and Rouen before toll roads to Calais. Saves a lot of money and you have many more options for food breaks at local resto's much better than motorway stops !

Tweedpipe

Must agree to a large extent with the above. Using the motorway you can pass by unnoticed some great towns and villages that merit discovery. I fell in love with our nearest town many years ago when travelling frequently up the then main route in the early 70's. Now it's bypassed completely by the motoway, and had that mway existed in the 70's we probably wouldn't now be living in our current idylic location. Worth a thought.......

grannybunz

When we first started travelling around France in the 1970s we didn't ever use autoroutes - not that there were that many! Couldn't affort it and anyway what's the point in a Renault 4 in fact 3 of them one after another. In that way we got to know just about every part of \France, some fabulous secret places and some great hotels and restaurants. Including one riverside hotel in the Auvergne where our loo, high up in a tower, actually overhung the river which could be seen flowing past way below., though fortunately no longer part of the plumbing system..