Our 2022 Brittany Motorhome Tour Costs

OK, so first things first, we weren’t planning to go to Brittany. However we ended up doing a 35 night tour around its coast and here is a round up of where we went with links to the blog posts we wrote at the time. At the bottom of the post you’ll find a breakdown of our costs for the trip.

Trip Round-up

In early August we spotted a gap in our calendar and booked our usual Dover to Calais ferry to ensure we used the opportunity to go somewhere. The ferry was £192, which we could have got a bit cheaper if we’d gone for overnight crossings. However, I think any Hymer owner with a van around the same age as ours will tell you that while those little round headlights look cute, they emit next to no light, so night driving isn’t a fun experience.

As we had to fit this trip around appointments at home, we found ourselves touring France during school holidays, which is very unlike us. Having not toured in France since 2019 (we did two overnight stops on our blast back from Spain at the start of the pandemic, but we don’t count those as touring!) we weren’t sure if aires and campsites would be chock-full and we’d need to book in advance. So as usual, we decided to wing it and find out.

Our first stop was the familiar surroundings of Canterbury Park and Ride. We’re so grateful to the council for providing this facility and use it pretty much every time we catch the ferry from Dover or the Chunnel. Having heard reports of massive delays at the port, we got up early to be sure we’d arrive at Dover in plenty of time. It turned out there were no queues and we were so early that they put us on an earlier ferry. With a heatwave forecast we know it’s not pleasant experience in a small metal box, so having learned how to cope during previous heatwaves we checked the map and made our way to the coolest nearby bit of France and spent a few days at a campsite in the sand dunes at Sainte-Cecile-Plage.

It was at this point that we decided to have a look around Brittany as folks say the down side of this area of France is the weather, and the forecast for the foreseeable was looking pretty good. We broke up the trip with stops at two very busy motorhome aires in Le Treport and Honfleur. Reaching Caen we bought a mobile data SIM from Free when we realised just how much data we use these days and then headed for our first stop in Brittany at an aire on the small peninsular of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer.

After a free night overlooking Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer we moved on to Cap Frehel where Jay got to air his wetsuit and enjoy a bit of snorkeling. These stops were the green dots between the burgundy ones on the map below, close to Saint Malo.

We then did a decent drive over to near Lannion and a campsite on Ile Grande, where we both agreed if we’d been on a longer tour we could easily have stayed there for a lot longer. We then back-tracked a little to a motorhome aire at Tregastel so we could walk the Pink Granite Coastal Path, where we were also treated to a display by the Patrouille, the French version of the Red Arrows.

A blast across the Brittany peninsular and we reached Brest on the south coast. Here we stayed in the car park for the Oceanopolis aquarium for a couple of nights before setting off to explore the Crozon Peninsular. We stayed at the motorhome aire in Camaret-sur-Mer and explored the coastal path between its rocky headlands, before heading to the coastal resort of Morgat for the weekend.

We were starting to feel the clock ticking on our trip, so did a couple of one night stops. The first was a free aire at Plonevez-Porsay which was just a short drive from the medieval village of Locronan, the second in the municipal campsite in the city of Quimper. We then made our way to the walled citadel of Concarneau. Here we stayed in a motorhome aire on the opposite side of the bay to the citadel, using an electric ferry to make the short hop over the water.

Our last stop in Brittany was in a motorhome aire in Port-Louis near Lorient. We were nicely protected from a few windy days by the walls of the nearby citadel which wrapped along the coast to the aire. From here we caught the ferry over to Lorient for a few hours to explore the massive U-Boat pens between downpours.

It was then time to start our journey back to Calais, and we broke up the driving by stopping at the free motorhome aire in Fourgeres. We’d visited the town during the first week of our original motorhome tour back in 2011, and were surprised to find it quite different from what we remembered. We then moved back to the coast for a few days in the motorhome aire at Saint-Valey en Caux, a place we tried to stay at during the end of our first tour but it was full. This time we managed to squeeze into a space on the front row looking out across the sea and enjoyed a couple of days watching boats go in and out of the harbour.

We followed the coast road to spend the night at one of our favourite free motorhome aires at Stella Plage. We were now mid-September and out of season, so as usual the town of Stella Plage was closed, but that’s how we like it. After a day of shopping, laundry and filling up with fuel, we spent our last night of the trip at the free motorhome aire at Sangatte before catching the ferry back home.

We were away for 35 nights, which compared to our earlier trips is quite a short stint, but I think we’ll be doing more of these in the future due to the Schengen time limit and family commitments back home. However, it seemed so much longer, in a good way. It took me a week or so to settle back into being on the road, and the last few days were spent making our way back to Calais, but we’ll certainly be exploring around Brittany again.

Our Brittany Motorhome Tour Costs

Trip Length

Our entire tour was 35 nights, most of which were spent getting to Brittany. For any future trips we’d certainly consider a ferry from Portsmouth to Caen, St Malo or Cherbourg, which would be more expensive but would save us quite a bit on fuel.

Ferry Costs

Our ferry was from Dover to Calais with DFDS. We booked it a couple of weeks before we set off and it cost us £192 for a return.

Diesel Costs

We drove a total of 1,403 miles (2,258 kilometres) on our trip and filled up with diesel six times. The most expensive fuel was in the UK at £1.84 per litre, the cheapest €1.64 (£1.40) per litre. While we were away the French Government subsidised fuel prices by 20c a litre, and Total Energies also reduced prices of fuel in their stations by a further 30c – needless to say, our fill ups were mainly at Total as they became temporarily cheaper than supermarket petrol stations.

In total we used 257 litres of diesel, 56.57 gallons, so we averaged around 24.8 miles per gallon. The total cost for diesel for the trip was £390.13

Food and Drink Costs

Our biggest cost, and my biggest weakness, is food shopping. Be that in a local market, or at the supermarket, I can’t help it, I just love mooching around and trying tasty looking treats. Over the course of the trip we spent £429 on food shopping, which doesn’t include the final supermarket stock up of goodies to bring back to the UK.

In addition to this we also spent £165 eating out, this covers everything from meals out to coffees and ice creams. Of course, we’d have spent money on food and eating out if we hadn’t gone away, but I suspect we spent a bit more while touring.

Overnight Stop Costs

The final big cost of the trip was overnight stops, on which we spent a total of £320. We stayed in a lot of popular places on the coast, otherwise it would have been possible to reduce this to £0. Instead, we chose to mix things up stopping in campsites, paid motorhome aires, free motorhome aires and free parking. We had one night in the UK at a paid aire, 11 nights on campsites (average £14.33 per night), 17 nights on paid aires (average £9.05 per night), three nights on free aires and three nights free parking. So over the whole trip our average night stop cost was £9.15.

Other Costs

We spent £37.45 on entry fees for two to the Oceanopolis aquarium in Brest (well we had stayed for free for two nights in their car park!).

Road tolls were £30.42 which includes both the Dartford crossing and the Pont du Normandie bridge in both directions. We used toll roads when we had long driving days, but the cost is low because the motorways in Brittany are free.

Three loads of laundry cost £25, which includes a final big wash of everything before we came home. Personally I took far too many clothes because I packed for all weathers and we mainly only had lovely sunny days.

We filled up with LPG twice, once just a few days into the trip as our bottles were low from a previous trip, so while we sent £21.41 on gas, we only really used 17 litres of gas on this trip which cost around £10.50.

In Brittany we twice stayed in aires across the bay from somewhere we wanted to see, so we used public transport in the form of small ferries to get us across the water at a cost of £5.91.

Total Costs

The total cost for our 35 night tour of Brittany was £1,641 or £46.87 per night. We had a fantastic time and while I logged what we spent, we didn’t let a ‘budget’ influence what we bought or did.

Back in 2016 we published costs for a whole year on the road which worked out at £47.17 a night. However those costs did include insurance, 2 MOTs and repairs etc. On that year-long trip we had 188 free nights, so our average overnight stop cost was just £5, and as you would expect, from me, the biggest cost was food shopping.

If you are keen to learn more about the costs of touring in a motorhome, we’ve got a whole section on motorhome tour costs from previous trips.

Ju x

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