Our 2019 Europe Motorhome Tour

Our Motorhome Tour Summary

In mid-May 2019 we set off for a European motorhome tour of France and Switzerland in order to run in the Zermatt Half and Ultra Marathons in early July. We booked a late afternoon crossing on the ferry and made our way to Sangatte for our first night. We then spent a few days at one of our favourite aires at Stella Plage, before heading south to the rural area around Neufchatel-en-Bray for a week, followed by a little blast across France to meet up with friends on a campsite near the iconic Chateau Chambord, for a week by the Loire. 

It was then time to head for the mountains. Reaching the awe-inspiring French Alps, we parked up at Bourg d’Oisons to find half of the Netherlands camped up in the town during an epic charity raising cycling effort for charity. We stayed there for a couple of nights, so we could run up the iconic 21 hair-pin bends of the Alpe d’Huez. After a couple of nights on a mountain pass, staying on the out-of-this-world Col de la Croix de Fer, we headed downhill to Chambery where Ju stayed on a campsite while Jay returned to the UK.

Once reunited we watched a stage of the Criterium de Dauphine before heading back up into the mountains to avoid the worst of a pan-European heatwave and for some more uphill running training for Zermatt on the Col de Madeleine. After a quick stop in the stifling heat in Albertville, we headed to high altitude again to Plaine Joux which has a stunning view out over the Mont Blanc Massif. We met a semi-retired Australian chap, Ted, who was staying in the aire there for a few weeks and paragliding when the fancy took him, flying down the mountain (literally) to get a baguette then getting the bus back up.

After just over a month in France we entered Switzerland and spent our first night at the still-semi-frozen (in late June) Lac d’Emosson. We had hoped to go looking for the dinosaur prints that are nearby, but it was still too early in the season and the paths were closed due to snow. We then made full use of our Swiss road vignette and took the motorway to Bern where we stayed on a campsite just outside the city for a couple of nights to celebrate Jay’s birthday and to watch the Formula E race in the city.

With another heatwave reaching Europe, we headed for high altitude again. This time we spent a few nights in a car park in the Gantrisch Nature Park, where we enjoyed beautiful scenic runs and walks, sharing the spot with some Swiss motorhome neighbours. We then came back down to Lake Thun (Thunersee) where we tried our best to keep cool in an ACSI campsite, by doing very little. Another retreat from the heat up to altitude saw us return to a car park on a private road just off the Susten Pass which we first visited several years ago. Here we spent several days parked by the snow and cool meltwater of the Stone glacier. That’s one simply amazing place to sleep folks.  

The weather forecast said the heatwave would break, but it was 39°C in the valley, so after a sweltering night on another ACSI campsite by the Aare Gorge, we went back up to altitude. We zig-zagged up the Grimsel pass, stopping off on the way to have a go on the stupidly-steep Gelmerbahn (funicular train) which was closed when we last passed this way, then climbing up to the top of the Furka Pass for a couple of nights.

It was now time to head to our campsite near Zermatt. On the way off the Furka Pass we stopped at the Rhone Glacier, where we walked inside the glacier in the tunnel which the family-owned business has cut every year since 1870. We arrived at Camping Tasch, parked up Zagan for a few nights and made the most of the train tickets, the final part of the Glacier Express, which were included in our race entry fee. We caught the train down the valley to collect our race numbers, and the next day we went up to the top of Gornergrat at 10,000 feet to eyeball the finish of Jay’s ultra race. The following day, Jay ran the Gornergrat Zermat Ultra Marathon, while I took part in the Half Marathon – between us raising just under £1800 for the British Lung Foundation.

The day after the race we watched the European Mountain Running Championship which shared the same finish as the half marathon. The following day our train tickets ran out, so Zagan’s rest was over. We drove back down the Zermatt valley visited friends who were staying in an amazing chalet near the ski resort of Crans-Montana. After that we went back to the Torrent-Neuf walkway (staying in a free aire) which we visited around the same time last year, enjoying the walk and its wobbly suspension bridges.  

We crossed Switzerland from south to north in two days, emerging from several miles of tunnels in France at the town of Heircourt, where a stage of the Tour de France rode through the following day. We parked up by the roadside and enjoyed the spectacle. That weekend was Bastille day, so everywhere was packed. We managed to squeeze ourselves into the aire at Gerardmer (the first aire we ever stayed in) and were treated to a weekend of celebrations including a bike race around the town, free concerts, a huge bonfire and a fireworks display over the lake.  

We spent a few days in the Saint Die des Vosges before we drove through Luxembourg, filling up with cheap diesel and LPG, and on to Redu in Belgium. Famous for its books, we preferred staring at the huge dishes communicating with satellites at the nearby European Space Agency centre. Onwards back into France and we had a night at a snail farm before returning to Sangatte, where our French trip started, for a couple of nights before we caught the ferry back the UK.

Back in Blighty we stopped the night at the aire in Canterbury, catching the Park and Ride bus into the city for a meal at Wetherspoons and a wander around the shops – it’s great to go away, but always nice to come home too. From Canterbury we drove north to Kenilworth where we stayed for a couple of nights in the car park of the local Rugby club, which we found on the park4night.com app. After which we met up with our friends and enjoyed the Carfest North festival. On the Thursday we were trying to keep cool with ice creams, by Sunday we were soaked to the bone and up to our ankles in mud. We rounded off our trip by getting towed off the festival site by a tractor!

 Countries Visited

France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, UK

Motorhome Tour Route

Read about the whole tour

The first day of this tour – Our Second 2019 motorhome tour of Europe begins.

You can work your way through this tour by clicking on the link above. Once you have read that blog post you can move onto the next one using the arrows on either side of the page.

Find out about a specific place on the tour

If you want to know more about a specific place on the tour, click here and you will see a map (like the image above) of all of our tours. You can zoom in and click on the dot to get GPS Co-ordinates and information about where we stayed, as well as a link the the blog post we wrote about being there.

How much did our motorhome tour of France & Switzerland cost?

We keep track of what we spend. Why – it’s a long story but you can read all about in the Financial Freedom section of this blog. Tracking our spending makes it really easy to work out our motorhome tour costs for each of our trips. You can find all previous trips in the Motorhome Costs section of this blog, including our year in a motorhome which contains all annual costs too . It’s worth noting that these are our costs, and while they are a good starting point if you planning a similar trip, your costs may differ considerably.

The total cost for 74 days touring in Zagan, our motorhome, was £2752.76, which breaks down to £37.20 per night. This includes vehicle insurance and tax and personal travel insurance, but it does not include costs for MOT or repairs as we did not have any during this trip. It also doesn’t include motorhome depreciation, which we calculate at 2% a year on our motorhome as it is 18 years old. There is a full breakdown of the costs below.

Zagan, our 2001 Hymer B544 with a 2.8JTD engine supped diesel 478 litres of diesel at 24.5MPG over 4148km (2577 miles). We also used 42 litres of LPG which cost around €0.90 a litre in France and €0.46 a litre in Luxembourg.

Over 33% of the total cost for the trip was paying for food and drink, either from the supermarket or eating out. Diesel was our next biggest cost, followed by the cost of campsites and the price of the ferry.

Below is breakdown of where we spent our nights in each country (the £10 spent in the UK was for the farmer who towed us off the festival site with his tractor – he didn’t ask for anything, but we were sure he had better things he could be doing!) The ACSI campsites are part of the Camping Card out-of-season discount scheme – well worth looking into for a camping holiday in Europe.

I know lots of you like to see the motorhome tour costs details to help with you own tour planning – so here they are. Hopefully the categories are self explanatory (supplies/misc is everything else that doesn’t fit in the categories). The cost for the runs in Zermatt are not included as they were paid when we booked in 2018 (the half marathon was €84.40, the ultra €136.90), but the charity dash at Carfest are included as Running).

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

*The costs for motorhome insurance, tax and personal travel insurance all needed to be renewed during this trip. I didn’t feel it was fair to include the full amount for the year in these costs as we take several trips per year. So I took the total for all three, divided it by the number of days in the year, then multiplied by the duration of this trip.

Practical Advice for Your Own Motorhome or Campervan Tour

Fancy wandering Europe in your motorhome or campervan? We’ve pulled together a book containing all the practical advice we’ve learned from years of motorhome holidays and long-term touring. The Motorhome Touring Handbook will give you all the info you need, and is available from Amazon as a paperback or Kindle eBook.

Thanks, Julie