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There's plenty of service areas on the M5 all with ampe parking areas for your outfit. We only use the MacDonalds al Collumpton because we only travel from just north of Bristol & normally need to pop in there for a quick breather and check round.

Parking a big caravan in there is best done at the far end in the section where the lorries park. We have managed in the caravan section with our outfit before but if it's busy it can be a bit restrictive.

You should avoid the bottleneck through the M5/M4 split by travelling down through Saturday and stopping overnight then going on down Sunday. Are you familiar with the area where your overnight site is booked booked north of Bristol?

BB

Another thank you for starting this thread, its very informative. We are off to Cornwall for the first time next weekend. I'm used to driving to Plymouth with the van as we go to France most years but this time we have a rescue dog and she had never been used to being in cars and got very stressed, so we cancelled the France visit as the 8 hrs on the ferry alone could have been hell for her. However with patience she has come round to car travel so we opted for Cornwall instead. Plenty stops on the way down I think.

Dave

We have towed our van to Cornwall many times but as we have to go in high season, we try to avoid travelling in the middle of the day on a Saturday as this seems to be when all the traffic jams happen, especially around Bristol and/or Exeter.

We are in the Midlands, set of Saturday at about 2 o'clock (let the rush go before we do) make our way down as far as Weston Super Mare and stop off at the C&CC site there (about 10 mins. from motorway junction).   That way we know we can get something to eat (plenty of restaurants and supermarkets close by), pitch the van somewhere safe and get a good nights sleep.  It also means you have the usual site facilities so can have a shower etc. in the morning and get water and so on to make tea and breakfast.  

We find that doing overnight stops on a site helps to make the journey part of the holiday.   We usually do the same trip in reverse on the way home, so always book high season pitches Sunday to Sunday.

We have done overnight stops at the motorway services but found it was so noisy with trucks coming and going, we couldn't sleep properly.