Stopover Hotels
Whether you’re planning to travel to the north, south or central France, there’s one thing you may wish to consider and that’s booking a stopover hotel.
We have travelled to many different parts of France at various times of the year and each and every time we’ve travelled we’ve always thought about booking a stopover at a hotel en-route.
Why book a stopover hotel?
If you travel from Dover to Calais for example as we’ve done many times in the past, do you really want the risk of getting to the ferry late or even missing your ferry?
One thing we always do is to look at the campsite we are travelling to and what time we are likely to get there and we then decide on whether to book a hotel.
If you take 2015 as an example, we holidayed at Le Clarys Plage in the Vendee for a week and then at Les Alicourts in the Loire. Now we drove from the southwest of England to Dover to catch the Dover to Calais ferry and then drove down to Le Clarys Plage.
You may wonder whether it was easier, shorter and quicker to travel from Plymouth to Roscoff however you’d be wrong. The ferry from Dover to Calais was considerably less expensive, the journey time was approximately the same and the distance was negligible.
The only difference was, that instead of driving to Dover, crossing to Calais and then driving straight to the Vendee as we would have done on the Plymouth to Roscoff night ferry, we decided to have an overnight stay in Folkestone instead. This meant that we broke our journey down into two days. On the first, we travelled up to Folkestone and on the second we caught a short ferry across the channel and then drove to the Vendee.
If we’d caught the ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff we would have caught the night ferry (travelling overnight) arriving the next morning and then would have travelled down the next day. In effect, our journey would have taken two days no matter which way we went.
An essential part of travelling
Overnight stays are an essential part of travelling as with us travelling for so long with three kids is quite tiring in itself. The overnight stay allows us to split our journey into sections, allowing the kids a little break between long distances in the car and making sure that they are fresh to enjoy their holiday when we finally arrive at our campsite of choice.
In previous years we’ve even arrived at the ferry, travelled across the channel and then found a hotel to stopover at, in France. There really is so much choice available when it comes to a stopover hotel.
If you have young children hotels can even be a bit of an adventure. Ours love to explore the hotel as soon as we arrive and with breakfast available with the stay, you can really make a positive start to your holiday.
If you’re planning to go camping in France and are likely to have a long journey why not consider booking a stopover hotel or campsite, believe us when we tell you you wont regret it!