Driving on the continent!

[NopeNopetyNope]

Hello, I'm looking for any tips or advice/guidance from people who've driven through France and Spain. Or any words of reassurance!

OH has just surprised us all with a camping trip in Spain. He has booked the time off work, sorted car and health insurance and come home today with a brand new tent and a load of other camping gear. He's also told the children who are beside themselves with excitement!! I know that lots of people would just pop in the car and go for it and I don't want my children to miss out on an adventure because of me but I suffer terribly with anxiety! Realistically it will be me doing the driving as OH won't be able to do much due to health reasons.

I don't even speak the languages, what about road signs?! Maybe if we were driving in Germany I'd mange to read the road signs but I don't even have a base knowledge of French or Spanish. Road signage is really worrying me. I'm also worried about not knowing which types of roads I'll be driving on (eg highways or narrow country lanes), refuelling (not sure what worries me about this but it does), overnight stops or rest stops, interacting with people! I have social anxiety and struggle interacting with people who speak the same languages as me, I will need to use my phone translator but what if people get impatient with me or think I'm ignorant for not knowing the language? Oh and the ferry, I've never driven onto one before and have no idea how it works.

I wish I was carefree and just went with the flow, enjoyed the adventure of exploring new places and I want my children to experience that without me ruining it so please, any guidance or reassurance (as much reassurance as you can muster) will be so much appreciated!

And thank you of you read all of that, apologies if I've rambled.

• OP it was closer to £200-300 in fuel in France alone.

Yes Macron has just slapped a 20% increase on petrol.

If you go via the Paris ring, stick to the east side. The traffic on the west is much worse.

When the French overtake they keep their indicators on until they've finished the manoeuvre and pulled back in. So someone driving along indicating in the middle lane of the motorway won't be about to move to the outside lane, they're still overtaking a lorry and will move back to the inside lane when they're done.

Don't be tempted to leave ANYTHING in your car overnight in a French motel/ hotel car park. It will get broken into.
And don't be surprised if they're busy all night as the cheaper ones often double as brothels.

How old are the children? Will they cope with three days in the car? We drive these kinds of distances every year for our summer holidays but prefer to break it up a lot. eg one overnight stop to get us to Avignon, then a six hour drive to Tarragona, then another five hours onto Valencia, sometimes staying a couple of nights at the stopovers depending on what there is to do and see.

@NopeNopetyNope I live in the south of France and have driven through France to and from the UK many times. And we’ve also been on holiday to the Tarragona area a couple of times.

You haven’t said when you’re travelling. Look at the French Bison Futé website which has the road congestion forecast for each day. The motorway from Béziers (on the south west Mediterranean coast of France) down to the border with Spain will be very busy in August, especially on the weekends. The motorway from Calais tends to be quiet, getting busier as you get closer to Paris. It can be worth avoiding Paris for example going via Reims, but it’s further to drive if you’re coming from Calais.

If you go around Paris you need one person driving and the other 100% focused on navigating. The motorway around Paris isn’t a simple ring like the M25 around London - there’s lots of joining motorways and needing to be in the correct lane. It’s ok, but busy and you need help with navigating if you’re unfamiliar.

Speaking of Paris, if you go that way, I would recommend taking the west route around Paris, on the A86 via the Duplex tunnel. It’s a 10km toll tunnel that costs around 10€ but quick because it’s expensive so less congested.

For hotels on the road we always use Novotel. They have plenty of family rooms. Ibis is also good. I find that the Novotel and Ibis hotels close to the motorways generally have secure parking.

As already said, make sure you get a CritAir sticker. Given the planning that you need to do for this trip I would focus on getting that and booking some stopover hotels. A motorway toll tag is nice and convenient but not essential - many people don’t have them. There are also tolls on the motorway in Spain.

When driving long distances I always make sure we have plenty of bottled water in the car. The motorway service areas can get extremely busy at lunchtime. I always carry emergency food so that we can eat something and not rely on having to buy something (bread rolls and a jar of peanut butter or chocolate spread).

It’s a very long drive. My kids are used to it, they each have an iPad which is loaded up with Netflix downloads and they spend the entire time watching that! We have a little adapter that plugs into the car for charging. If you don’t have tinted rear windows you may want to consider stick on sun shades for the rear windows.

Its easy to drive as the traffic is nowhere near as heavy in Spain and France

Take your time. Roundabouts are the the same just back to front. So take uour tome. Traffuc signs are virtually the same. You need to have. Your lights on in tunnels

Overthinking it, if you can drive you can drive there. You don't need to be fluent in the language.

That's a very long route.

I would do the route via Dreux to avoid Paris. Rouen and Dreux.
Then Orleans, down to Perpignan and into Spain.

The tolls are expensive though.

And it is hard doing long days driving. We've done it for several years - and although the autoroutes are easy, they can be long, especially with children.

This is a calculator for the tolls.

ViaMichelin : Itinéraires, Cartes, Info trafic, Hôtels

Honestly, once you get over there it really doesn’t take long to get used to it.

Check the speed limits in advance (with a conversion table using the same measurements that your car uses) for each type of road, and write them on a card and stick it on your dashboard.

On the backroads, if there is no other traffic around, say “we drive on the right” out loud when you get to a junction. Just to remind yourself. Make it a game with your children.

if you are anything like me, the biggest stress point is getting back home and realising how crap it is driving on our motorways.

@Inyourgarden I agree. It’s a fairly simple route, and all on motorways.

In your shoes I’d do Newcastle to Calais in one day, get a late shuttle and stay in Calais at a hotel. Then I’d get up bright and sparky and do the European leg in one go.

if the children were small, I’d stay in a motel for a night in France en route.

We do this regularly but not in August and not with children. My advice based on what you've said would be don't do it. Get him to change it to France or fly and hire a car.

Driving in France is lovely and the motorways can be quiet compared to here. I still feel I have to stay even more switched on though. Especially on the first bit after leaving the Eurotunnel train. I have a little chant that I repeat "right side of the road wrong way round the roundabout". Seems to work. The road signage is clear. Just make sure your satnav is up-to-date if you can.

It's not rubbish. I've driven alone in France with my two children since they were 4 yrs old. From calais to Sarlat. 9 hours straight. Reduced if go via Paris and I've done that both east and West route and I've also driven via Rouen dreux and down.

I'm a very experienced and confident driver and I'm also fluent in French.

I think the majority of subsequent posts to mine agree that driving to Spain in high temperatures when op is not confident and with kids in the car is madness. There are plenty of lovely campsites in Normandy or Brittany or even further south that won't entail the stress of driving to France.

I'd also add that you must have air con in your car. Driving south and therefore into the sun ALL DAY is hard. One year I had to borrow a car without aircon and I basically got sunstroke driving from calais to Limoges non stop. It killed me and I was quite ill as a result.

I would listen to the very good advice on here and shorten your plan considerably.

As an aside the hotel chain Ibis is v reliable.

@cakeorwine
You are right, too long via San Sebastian, from Bordeaux go to Toulouse, (not Bayonne), so:

Calais
Rouen
Le Man (La Flèche)
Tours
Poitier
Bordeaux
Toulouse
Narbonne
Perpignan
Barcelona
Tarragona

The Calais to Bordeaux route is A LOT less busy than Calais-Paris-Orleans- Perpignan route (also less spectacular) and more straightforward - it might be longer by 90 miles but it will be a lot quicker - if you stick with motorways.

Going via Paris in the summer is always a bad idea (unless you want to stop there), even more bonkers this year with the Olympics, avoid!

@Sagarmatha is not wrong, the sun will be beating on you, the driver, all the way going South. You need good sunglasses! If your windscreen isn't climate comfort glass maybe look into other solutions.

That poster thinks it's "a breeze" to drive for 15 hours "non stop".

I think that tells you all you need to know.

I've driven on my own for 8 hours before non stop and it was very tiring so god knows what doing double that feels like.

OP if you insist on doing it (I still wouldn't recommend it) the thing I would recommend re hotels is sort them out in advance - ignore your husband.

The last thing you want to be doing is searching round for a hotel in the dark on unfamiliar roads after a 7 hour drive with kids in the back. You might also find a lot of them are booked up because of the holidays.

You should be able to find hotels very close to the peage which means you will hardly have to drive off it. Then the only significant challenges (apart from the heat and distance) are navigating around big cities like Paris (which you might be able to avoid) and getting off the motorway to the campsite at the end.

You might want to try to time it so you hit problem areas either really early or late at night. That way there will be much less traffic.

If as you say you can drive long distances (8 hours) then you at least know what that feels like and how doing that for 3 days in a row will impact you. You will get used to the peage pretty quickly. It's doing the stuff off the peage that is hard work.

Familiarize yourself with this road sign, it gave me quite a shock the first few times cars pulled straight out in front of me in situations I assumed I had right of way! (Such as from a side road)

OP, bear in mind that at the end of your holiday you'll have to do the whole thing in reverse: a 2 day trip minimum back to the ferry port plus a day back to Newcastle. I would really look seriously at chopping in your Spanish campsite for one in eg. the Dordogne. Much easier journey, although you're still likely to need an overnight stop in France on the way down and back.

If you've never camped, don't underestimate how long it can take you to set up and get organised - it's pretty tiring when everyone is frazzled from a long journey, and then you need to factor in the additional heat which is energy-sapping: you may also need to fit in a supermarket shop to get provisions or take kids somewhere to eat. We're really experienced campers and know how to pace ourselves, but even so can find ourselves getting irritable putting up a tent in high temperatures, so make sure you build in contingency for this sort of thing - we arrive early afternoon, put up the tent and basics and then go to the pool, come back and finish off when it's cooler - and also for traffic delays: you don't want to be arriving so late your first experience of putting up a tent is in the dark after a long day's travel.

Absolutely.

We arrived once near Beziers - we had been hit by some delays on the way down - and putting up a tent in the heat after a long journey and knowing you have to potentially cook as well can be challenging.

Packing and unpacking can take much longer than you realise!!

Is the campsite part of a chain that might let you switch to a different location?

Reading your updates OP I don't think your problem is really driving abroad, though that does add some complications. The issue is that your DH appears to have made a unilateral decision about the holiday location and then absolved all responsibility for actually organising anything to you..and without even giving you a reasonable time frame to do it in.
A trip like this could be a great adventure for the family if planned well, but currently it sounds like an endurance feat rather than a holiday. He's expecting you to drive non stop for distances that would probably be illegal for a professional driver, at the hottest time of the year, on unfamiliar roads with probably bored and grumpy children in the car. That will be no fun for anyone, and it wouldn't be in any country. Road signs etc are the least of your problems really.
And not booking overnight stops ahead is insane. You've already discovered the issues with ferries and hotels are also likely to be booked in popular places. In fact given we are in the second week of the school holidays already, you are presumably going to have to get everything sorted within the next week or so if you're going for 2 weeks plus travel days? That is a lot to plan in a very short period of time. It can take weeks to get a Crit'Air sticker. Maybe you can buy them there, I don't know, but that's added hassle even if you can. And there's plenty of other stuff to sort out - insurance etc.
If you were planning this for next year you could choose the best ferry crossing for you, book some stops along the way in interesting places, have plenty of time to get all the admin done and plan your route properly. Plus you could do some practice camping weekends at home to identify any potential hiccups there.
But trying to do it all in this hurried way could change a fun holiday with your family into something of a nightmare. That will almost certainly be worse for your DC than the disappointment of cancelling now.

Crit Air shouldn't be too much of an issue -

There aren't many places that seem to need it

Home page | Official website for the Crit'Air sticker (certificat-air.gouv.fr)

If it were me the DH will be sorting out putting up the damn tent while the person who has just driven over a 1000 miles had a well earned rest.

We have done several road trips across Europe in August with 3 kids and I absolutely would not do this. We are in the SE of England (i.e. not starting from Newcastle!) and both DH and I are confident drivers and we fully share the driving. We also do Eurocamp or similar - taking our own tent to Europe is too much faff, it's not just the tent it's the fact you have to take every single thing you need... potato peeler, chopping board,...
And if we're going to the south of Europe in August I'd rather have air conditioning in a mobile home. We have always planned our trips including all channel crossings and overnight stops MONTHS in advance. We never aim to drive more than 6 hours in a day... by the time you've done endless toilet and snack stops, and refereed the fighting kids, that is more than enough. For an impromptu camping holiday I would stick to the UK.

Lots of practical driving advice on here but I agree that's the least of the issues. This is definitely the kind of thing that both parties need to be up for (and ideally plan together in advance) and your 'partner' has just done the easiest bit by far!

We're an adventurous family; seasoned campers; live in the south of the UK; have both camped in Wales and driven to France in the last month alone and I absolutely wouldn't be up for your trip.

If you do still go, another consideration is what you might envisage doing during the day once at the campsite in Spain? If the campsite doesn't have much shade, it can be really difficult to get a break from the heat, as the tent will be boiling until quite late in to the evening.