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La Rochelle is 437 miles from Calais or 6 hours 50 mins driving time.If you leave early in the morning you could do it in a day.  We allow a couple of hours for breaks taken mid morning, lunch time and mid afternoon.

Regards Bob

Quote: Originally posted by nikkid21 on 14/6/2011

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We are off to vendee for the first time in august - distance is 431 miles from the tunnel. We live 90 mins from tunnel so plan to get up at 4 for a 5.30 am crossing and drive straight down.

It will be slow as we have the trailer but I'm taking the Quechua pop up for the first and last nights so we don't have to deal with putting up the Florida when tired (and can put it down dry and leisurely the afternoon before we leave.

Kids aged 9 & 7 have DVD player in the car so will watch that and sleep part of the way. Husband and I save up about 30 hours of podcasts to listen to.

I am a bit apprehensive about doing such a long drive in one hit but hubby says it's no different to driving to Scotland in a day and he would rather get the holiday started asap.

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We have done that and its been no problem. Its not as hard as it sounds doing that drive if you are going on the autoroute. (yes you pay for it but its quick and stress free driving) We drive down from Sheffield through the night ( me driving, everybody else kipping - supposedly!) The OH takes over and does the France driving. The buzz of going on holiday makes it easy! DVDs for kids are a must!

I would say if you are leaving at 4am for a 90 min drive for the 5.30am crossing you may be cutting it a bit fine!

I don't know how new this is - we only discovered last summer that tourist offices (one in every town) now have a computer system which seems to link to every hotel/b&B &c in the country and allows you to book ahead:  Because of the weather we decided to change plans and take an overnight hotel in Chalon on our way home a few days later; went to our nearest tourist office - the charming woman did a search; came up with several pages of hotel vacancies sorted in order of price; we took the cheapest in the town centre which turned out to be a lovely place full of character, at much the same price as a cheap chain hotel - with a good breakfast and en-suite facilities. So in future we shan't be doing out own web searches or door to door!

Quote: Originally posted by Val A on 14/6/2011

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........What we realised when travelling is that a lot of the smaller 'N road' type hotels have now closed due to lack of business, or are open only in July/August, and those still operating tend to be more expensive, B and Bs and Chambre d'Hotes are not as numerous as you would think, and the 'budget' hotels are always alongside the autoroutes or on the exits into major towns and have to be located in the appropriate 'Zone Commercial.

We tried several towns and after a few 'Non' replies, you get a bit dispirited.  So the alternative is to be more organised and try and plan where you'll be at any particular time - not easy when you have a car with problems as we did this time.

It brought it home to me how complacent we caravanners can be about the ease of organising a stopover - and how we'll have to plan better next time if we want to end up with anything more than a 'Formule1' type last minute find!  Actually the room in the Lemon Hotel (rebadged Formule1) was standard, but the breakfast much better than I remember being offered in any Formule1 in the past.

Post last edited on 14/06/2011 13:09:28

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Thanks for that Paul - very useful and may be of great help next trip!  It might have helped this time, but we really didn't know how far we'd get with the car playing up as it was doing.  We actually got much further north than we'd imagined and might well have booked a hotel a good few miles further south had we booked in advance!

Next journey we'll have a much better idea of the timings involved as I marked each stage in our Atlas and any hold-ups or problems, so we can better predict where we're likely to be when we want to stop.