Our 2019 Three Month Motorhome Tour of France and Spain
Our Motorhome Tour Summary
At the start of 2019 we set off for a three month motorhome tour of France and Spain. After a night at Canterbury Aire, we took the tunnel to France and headed south. We took the toll-free route via Orleans and picked up the free motorway south to the Med. We did quite long drives (for us) then stopped in places for a couple of nights.
Once we reached Spain we stuck close to the east coast, taking a detour to climb Montserrat, before stopping for a fortnight at the beach resort of Peniscola. After visiting the huge aquarium and stunning city of Valencia, we had to get a wheel bearing replaced on Zagan. We then headed inland to explore some of the natural parks and cities of Andalusia.
Ju fell over and injured her knee, so while we didn’t really have any fixed plans, we started to plan our stops around places she could hobble around. We managed a short stop to see the stunning cathedral mosque in Cordoba, before heading north through Extremadura. We stopped for a long weekend in Badajoz next to the Portuguese border, before heading east to The Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. After an unexpected festival in Briviesca we went to one of our favourite places San Sebastian – Donostia by the French border.
We gave ourselves a week to get across France and used quite a few toll roads to make it easier. It was a good job we built in some contingency time, because we broke down and had to recovered when we reached Chartres. So all in all it was quite an eventful trip!
Countries Visited
France, Spain
Motorhome Tour Route
Read about the whole tour
The first day of this tour – Tunnel Sous la Manche to Stella Plage.
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 grey 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 & Spain 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 three months touring in Zagan, our motorhome, was £3707.46, which breaks down to £45.77 per night. There is a full breakdown of the costs below.
These costs don’t include vehicle tax, MOT, vehicle insurance, breakdown cover, personal travel insurance or depreciation of the motorhome. They do include the cost of two wheel bearing repairs, one of which included a night in a hotel. The total cost without the repairs and hotel is £3,044.31 (£37.58 per night).
Zagan, our 2001 Hymer B544 with a 2.8JTD engine supped diesel 746 litres of diesel at 22.5MPG over 5942km (3692 miles). We also used 126 litres of LPG as it we needed the heating on every night when we weren’t hooked up to electricity – even when we reached Spain.
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 motorhome repairs and overnight costs.
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 pretty self explanatory (communication = mobile phones and data, supplies/misc = everything else from books and a sink plug to a frying pan and potato peeler).
It’s worth noting that a lot of the ATMs in Spain now charge you for taking out cash, even if you bank/card doesn’t. We got caught out once so when we found that CaxiaBank don’t charge, we hunted for those every time we needed cash.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.
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
Excellent blog, we really like to follow your adventures! I’m glad to see you didn’t over do it with the presents !😄
Ah yes, last of the big spenders! Those will be postcards on this trip as we weren’t away for any birthdays or Christmas.
Very interesting, we’re hoping to do a similar trip in September. Going to purchase the book. Thank you
Hope Zagan is better soon and back on the road. Thanks for sharing your costs, I always like to do that too, although everyone’s trip is their own it is a really helpful guide. Just thinking – when we’ve had a breakdown they pay for hotel costs if our van is in the garage. When we were in Greece these mounted up but did mean it didn’t put extra pressure on our budget.
Yes. The breakdown company will cover the hotel costs, we just need to claim the money back. That’s why I left both the repair and hotel costs out of the second set of total figures. Cheers Julie
Very interesting and informative. On the lpg side, do you have bottles or the refill system?
As we flit between countries and each country has its own set of gas connections and bottle schemes, we have a refillable Gas-it system which Jay installed. You can read all about it and see his video about installing it on this post – https://ourtour.co.uk/home/installing-a-gasit-self-refillable-lpg-system/
I have enjoyed following your latest tour. Such a shame about your breakdown, but at least you got sorted out in the end. I hope Ju is fully recovered now? We have started our own tour back in February and loving it, our costs have been a bit more than yours at around £55 per day. Relax and enjoy being back at home, I will be looking forward to your next trip :)
Hi
Thank you for sharing your information.
When we look at the cost of our adventures, we deduct our fixed cost per week just to live at home, excluding all fixed costs.
For example if we draw £100 per week at home, which is used for food, entertainment, leisure, fuel, personal expenditure.
We take this as a fixed buget home or away.
Therefore our ” away “ budget is the extras we spend above our home budget.
The longer you are away it can migrate the cost of getting there.
And the budget can balance.
Home or away, ignoring home and van fixed costs, can be the same.
Thanks John. That’s a great way of looking at trips as it will make them feel less expensive. We have an overall figure of £20k per year we aim to live on, be it at home or away. So all costs for day to day living are get included if we are on an adventure in the van, at home or some other way. Ju x
Great to hear you got back home safely. We enjoy reading about your adventures, thank you for sharing. A breakdown abroad when you can’t speak the language must be a worrying frustrating experience.
It’ll be interesting to find out why the wheel bearings went again. Do you think there could be a problem with the suspension?
Have you started planning your next tour yet?
Best wishes Paul and Kerrie
Hi both, Have been reading your blog since planning our first tour back in 2015. We’re now nearing the end of our second year of touring. Hope that Ju’s knee and Zagan’s wheels are well on the way to recovery. We must have missed you by a few days in Cáceres. If you’re heading back that way, the city is a must. It’s beautiful! And if you like pintxos, have you been to Logroño? Calle Laurel – probably our favourite dining experience so far! Looking forward to reading about your next adventures, Tanya
You did this so cheaply! Good for you. Especially the admission fees. We find we don’t want to visit a town or city and not see all of its attractions so we are spending quite a bit to see all the sights. And food – I know my husband eats a LOT and we do like to eat good quality but we’ve been spending much more on groceries than we expected, and much more than you. I think it just goes to show that these sort of trips can basically be achieved on almost any budget if you are prepared to consider where it’s important to spend and save your money. Thanks so much for all of the information, it’s really helped us with planning our adventures.
Cheers guys. We’ve met folks living on between £5k and £8k a year, so we’re blowing a ton of money compared with them! It’s interesting how much folks spend but in the end only you can know if you’re happy. We’ve tried spending less and it started to grind us down, so we now spend more. In fact we set ourselves a bigger budget than we manage to spend each year, so I guess we’re about right.
On your specific points:
1. We’re getting a tad long in the tooth at visiting places – been to thousands of attractions now and unless it’s something extra-ordinary, there’s little desire to visit more. Earlier on in our travelling we visited more paid attractions.
2. Everyone’s different with food. We eat meat, nuts, fish and cheese, which cranks our costs up, but we don’t buy tobacco or alcohol these days (Ju has the odd bottle of wine) so that drops the costs a fair bit.
Happy travels, thanks for getting in touch, Jay
First post on here, but will definitely be returning. Been thinking on and off about buying a van for years, and may be in a position to buy one next year.
Quick comment in the money spent on cards, do you have a currency card? I have one and I just load it with Euros and spend it like a regular card, or withdraw money from any cashpoint without any extra charges.
Hi Chris – yep, we’re currently using the CaxtonFX fella – cheers, Jay
I read about your blog in Nina’s Wheelintit blog
Traveling around Europe in an RV is a dream, seeing how it’s done is a HUGE help! Thanks for sharing.
Cheers Rob, you’re welcome, happy travels! Jay