Driving to Beziers

[Chrishazle]

I'm another who has for many years used Clubcard vouchers to pay for the tunnel, useually for daytrip booze cruises for £20 of Clubcard vouchers - and the ticket is valid until midnight the day after you go to France, so you can even do an overnight for that price! OK, we live 25 minutes from the terminal, so it's quick and easy for us (and quicker and easier than trying for the Dover ferry terminal) so it's a bit of a no brainer for us.

An aquaintance of mine often books 2 day trip tickets without putting in his car reg - one outbound returning the following day, the other Calais - Folkestone return for the day he wants to return, and just uses one half of each ticket. He claims he's never been caught - but I don't know whether to believe him, and have never tried this myself.

 

[Ricardo_e220]

Unlike others I prefer the Chunnel. After doing the ferry to calais for around 4 round trips, I decided to try the Tunnel, and never looked back. You can get out of your car for a quick stretch of your legs either in the carriage or at the terminal, and before you know it you are on your way to the nicer pastures. You also don't have to get there as early as you do for the ferry.

If you rack up some tesco clubcard points, you can triple them to pay for the whole return journey. I typically pay around £150 return on the tunnel, so £50 of clubcard vouchers will pay for that, and I collect an average of £40 vouchers a quarter, so over a year it easily pays for two trips and a night in a hotel (I use the remainder on Hotels.com which also triples the voucher)

Yep also prefer the tunnel these days, last time we got snarled up with the imigrants and blockade issues with trucks... with young kids I won’t risk it again, and also do the clubcard voucher boost

These days we are heading to the dordogne though so less in France but still 14 hours door to door (8 in France because it takes an hour just to get to a dualled road - and worse now it’s going to be 80kph )

 

[Ricardo_e220]

Edit - got stuck with ferry not tunnel

 

[LostKiwi]

These days we are heading to the dordogne though so less in France but still 14 hours door to door (8 in France because it takes an hour just to get to a dualled road

We go to the Charente Maritime which is next door to the Dordogne and that takes us 13 hours.
We drive 3 hours to Portsmouth, 1 hour at the ferry port, 3 hour crossing to Cherbourg (fast ferry - summer only), half hour to leave the ferry port then 5.5 to the door. Cherbourg is dual carriageway virtually immediately from the port. Tolls are only about €20 too.
We prefer the ferry as we can have breakfast and lunch on board before we start the longer driving section.