2018-04-15 Northern Italy and Southern France Calais to Home

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Northern Italy and Southern France Calais to Home

Northern Italy and Southern France by Hymer Motorhome

Calais to Home

We set the alarm for 7.00am but I wake at 6.35am so get up and make coffee. Breakfast, clear up, dressed and service Hymer and we are away by 8.30am. Ten minutes to the ferry port and a trouble-free check-in and passport control. Hymer gets a brief and cursory search, but some cars are having to pull everything out… interesting process.

We do not have to wait long before we board the Cote de Burgundy, a fairly small car ferry compared even to the one that takes us to Mull. We leave at 9.40am, ten minutes earlier than scheduled. The crossing is only 90 minutes but would choose the Shuttle anytime over the ferry, it was full of French teenagers on coaches obviously coming to England on a trip and hordes of families with even more hordes of kids… noisy and excited, nowhere civilised to sit only in the bar or the food hall (they obviously want you to spend money), plenty drinking beer at the bar (it was only 10.00am).

I guess the moral is to book earlier… at the last minute the ferry was half the price of the Shuttle. We arrived at Dover in thick fog, the white cliffs looming up out of the mist, quite eerie. It clears a little and is OK for driving.

The motorway route back home via M20, M25, M40/42 and M6, the 340 miles taking us seven hours of driving. The usual experience of roadworks, congestion, crazy drivers and torrential rain when we got to Warrington and further north. Home about 6.00ish so not too bad just tired.

We reflect on the roads, today in the UK we travelled nearly 350 miles, but were plagued by roadworks, congestion and crazy drivers. In France we avoid tolls and travel on the ‘ordinary roads’ which means we cover less than half the distance and are often passing through small villages with 50 and 30 kph limits and speed bumps. The drivers on these roads in France seem more tolerant. Around the French cities the roads are like racetracks. We don’t know which is best really, they are different experiences, what we do know is that we can’t wait to return to Europe and get some more of it, so it can’t be too bad or we would never want to go back.

Our Hymer motorhome trip to Northern Italy and Southern France

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Summary of motorhome journey – Calais to Home