The power of the sea has always held a fascination and a ferry ride is a fantastic opportunity to get out onto the ocean safely, for those  of us who don’t count themselves as sailors in our own right. Not only that, but it allows flexibility of travel, at a very reasonable price, for both foot passengers and cars, caravans, vans and lorries.

If you choose to drive in France, a ferry also provides a welcome break from the journey for the driver. I say that, because in my experience and that of others I speak to, it is usually one of the couple that drives, and the journey is not shared equally! You can take a welcome nap, have a variety of refreshments, including full breakfast, lunch and dinners, depending upon your mood. All this, with the added satisfaction, that despite you resting, you are still travelling and the children are entertained too.

As an adult, a ferry ride still presents me with a welcome break and the sea air and scenery really sets me up for the next stage of the journey. Travelling back from France, or elsewhere, the dover – Dunkerque ferry ride provides a great wind down from the holiday journey, nicely breaking up the monotony of holiday travel.

But if you are going over the channel for camping or mobile home holidays then you need to keep a sharp lookout for a cheap ferry to France, unless you’ve already booked through a tour operator, in which case they will automatically have given you the Dover to Calais crossing.

That option is fine if you intend to go to the south of France around the French Riviera region, but if you are bound for the west coast then you’re in for a mighty long drive which could have been avoided had you opted for the Poole ferry to St Malo.

OK, the Poole ferry takes 4.5 hours to get to St Malo, stopping at either Gurensey or Jersey to drop off and pick up, but it saves an enormous amount of stressful driving so it is well worth giving that some thought.

Well ok, that means you don’t have to pay extra an ferry fare to sail to Caen, Cherbourg or St Malo but it does leave you with a heck of a lot more driving and, therefore, a heck of a lot more fuel used, and at the price that fuel is these days you need to do some sums to determine if all those extra miles are worthwhile.

Look at it like this; If you drive from Calais to the Vendee, St Jean de Monts for example, then the distance is around 424 in miles, but only 168 miles when you take the Poole ferry to St Malo and drive down to St Jean de Monts.

Now that is a difference of 256 miles in anyone’s money, and not only do you have to take the extra fuel into consideration you also have a considerable amount to pay out in autoroute tolls, and they don’t come cheap either.

On the other hand, the drive from St Malo to the Vendee is toll free even though most of it is on fast dual carriageways.

All the above is worth thinking about before you canter off on your holidays to one of the caravan parks in France

It turned out to be a wonderful driving holiday and we ended up in a dusty little village on the southern coast called Agay. Apparently it is substantially bigger now and far more upmarket than it used to be all those years ago.

We toured all around the area and went to Cannes which was a busy and expensive town even then, Antibes, Nice and Monaco where we spent a couple of nights in a B&B. Methinks that of all those places it is Monaco which has changed the least.

We moved around some on our camping holidays and as we weren’t bound to any time limit we could go where we wanted until the money ran out. All good things come to an end sometime.

Well all that was the first holiday driving abroad but we did the same thing the next summer and toured down the west coast after taking the Poole ferry to St Malo and driving slowly down the coast through the Vendee, Charente and Aquitaine and finally ending up just south of Biarritz where we stayed a while for the surfing.

And of course, that is precisely where your ferry to France comes into its own as it gives you the time, the space and comfort to have a good meal and spread out for have a power nap should you need in very nice surroundings, all in the 90 minutes it takes for the crossing on the Dover to Calais ferry.

Unlike the ferries of yesteryear which we have written about on a previous blog (Launching our new site), the cross channel ferries these days are massive, and bear little resemblance to their forebears in any way, shape or form.

To be honest, I am unable to remember if meals were available on board 45 years ago, but if they were then they were also a waste of time and money for most of us because the boats rolled so much a great many of us were ill, and that was on a calm crossing too!

It has often been said that the English Channel between France and England is the most expensive stretch of water in the world, and whilst I can’t necessarily go along with that I also recognise that it is pretty dear, and the reason for that is that the ferries don’t take a great deal of traffic during the winter months, so they have to make what they can in the spring and summer.

But you can still get a cheap ferry crossing by checking the availability of some of the more off peak crossings, and by scheduling your journey around the ferry times you can save quite a nice little packet.

So permit me to take you back a few years, to 1965 which is 46 years ago to be precise, when 3 friends and I went on our first ferry to France Hell bent on a long summer holiday driving down to and camping in the south of France.

Our car was a little Hillman Imp which was supposedly competition to the Mini. It was a great little car which had a rear mounted Coventry Climax 875 cc aluminium engine. The boot, such as it was, was at the front and where the engine is in a normal car layout.

The petrol filler was also accessed from inside the front “boot” as well and this caused much merriment amongst the petrol attendants we met in France and Italy as it seemed that they hadn’t come across such a phenomenon before.

The Dover to Calais ferry cost precisely £13.10 shillings (£13.50) return for the four of us and the little car, and even by our impecunious standards then this was cheap when split between four people. Looking back at that figure makes me remember that £13. 10 shillings represented roughly half the wage of a skilled working man.

I remember thinking that the boat we sailed on seemed huge but that was probably because none of us had seen a proper ferry before, but in reality, compared to the cross channel ferries of today it was the sort of thing as giant would play with in the bath!

So to us it was big, but big it wasn’t, and that was borne out by the fact that it didn’t have stabilisers, so pretty nearly everyone was rushing to be ill over the sides.

It did have duty free though, but not as we know it (or knew it) as it was just a counter where you ordered what you wanted like a bottle of Scotch and 200 of your favourite fags, but nobody was allowed to walk in and browse like they do these days.

Ah well, those were the days of cheap crossings to France!

The Dover to Calais ferry is still one of the favourites despite having Eurotunnel right next door as a main competitor, but it is still the main crossing for anyone travelling down to French Riviera – Provence or Cote d’Azur, whichever you like to call it.

Most of the ferries to France on the Dover/Calais route take just 90 minutes, and yes, they were so much more fun before the ghastly unelected Beaurocrats in Brussels took away our duty frees on nearly all of our ferry routes, but that is something with which we have to live nowadays.

This is our first blog as you can see, and we are about to start work on our site in the very near future so that we can provide you all with up to the minute details of all the different ferry crossings to France, and more besides.