Family camping holidays in France

Taking the family on camping holidays to France can be an extremely enjoyable and rewarding experience for all; or a complete and utter nightmare! It depends on many factors such as travel, and if the children are quite young they may not travel too well, or they may become ill when you get there, it may even rain and they get bored! There is a golden rule which most parents know well: Keep the kids happy on hols and you all have a great time!

Seriously though, if you have a young family it may be worth while staying in a campsite nearer to the ferry port rather than bashing your way down to the South of France. Brittany and the Vendee are both within easy reach and driving to the furthest point of the Vendee from St Malo takes no longer than 3 hours. Brittany may have the edge if you have young children because normally it is a couple of degrees cooler than the Vendee, especially as you get nearer to Finisterre in the far West. In high season the Vendee can be very hot indeed and may be too much for some children.

Where your family camping holidays actually are depends to a certain extent on which ferry you take to France. If you book through a travel agent or the actual travel operator who owns the tent or mobile home you will be staying in then you can normally bet that the cost will include a Dover/Calais return crossing. Fair enough if you are travelling down to the Cote d'Azure but not a lot of use if your holiday is booked on the Western coast in the Vendee or even further South. You can opt to take another crossing which will save you driving time but of course this may cost more. However, equate the extra cost of the ferry to the savings you will make in fuel by not driving those extra miles and there may not be so much difference.

If you want to go it alone and have a budget holiday then the best way is to take all your own gear - it probably won't leave you much room in your car but it will save you an absolute fortune in rental during the high season. Tent camping holidays (with your own equipment) in France are arguably the best value for money holidays you will ever get, and a far better bet than staying in one of the ghastly, over priced camps here in the UK. We stayed in one of these when our kids were small and I dubbed it Stalag Brixham! I vowed, "Never again." There are stacks of camping sites in France which will welcome you if you take your own tackle, and to find them just type into a search engine "Camping france with own tent".

If you need to contact the campsite in France and your french isn't quite up to it then we suggest sending an email in French using a free language translation website. You will find that because you have done your best to communicate in French that the French owners will love you forever!

There are other tent camping options for your family holiday in France; one very large camping company specialies in tent camping which includes the tent of course, cooker, fridge and usually a small freezer, beds and possibly linen if you ask for it beforehand. We have seen their price list and compared to where we stayed in June 2007 for 2 weeks in a spacious mobile home the tent option with the other company worked out at £20 more than we paid! In high season the cost of renting the same tent was just astronomical. This is not what family camping holidays are about at all, in fact that was more like rip off Britain!

You may or may not be aware that holidays in mobile homes are regarded as camping holidays, in fact I believe that the term camping holidays refers to tents, mobiles, static caravans or any other accommodation which allows the user to "get away from it all". There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that family holidays in a mobile home are far better, and far better value for money than the aforementioned large British tent camping specialist, and of course, holidays in France tend to be much cheaper than they are here.