How I find cycle-touring campsites in France || Bikepacking Brittany and Normandy
[Music] I'm outside, it's after work. An after work ride in the sun, what?! [Music] [Music] I genuinely can't believe it, I cannot believe it's sunny, it's also really warm and I am really overdressed. I'm wearing thermal long bib tights because I, they're the only long bib tights I have, they're thermal, and it's like 16° C. So I am warm and I've got nowhere to, I mean I've got nothing to take off, you know what I mean. I can't swap it but it's amazing, it's very nice, people are out and they're happy. Sunshine makes such a big difference. It's the second week of April, oh this is honestly the first warm evening I feel like we've had, it is beautiful and the birds are singing and I just could not come out, even though there's a really weird cloud on the hilltop a couple of miles away, like really weird, can't really describe it. It sort of looks like cloud is like spilling over the hilltop and going down to the valley
but it's like white cloud, so I don't know what that is. I hope it's not, oh my God it's so warm, I hope it's not rain although then at least I will be adequately dressed. Anyway, the point is, I'm out, it's sunny and I had planned a different video for today to make, but because one must go outside when it is sunny in the UK, that video is going to be the same video but a different [Music] format. So the video I'm making is actually how to find French campsites for cycle touring, which is obviously a sort of computer heavy video, but obviously I've already been sat behind a computer for all of today and the sun's out and it's warm and so I'm cycling instead but I'm still going to talk you through in some way how to find French campsites when you're cycle touring and how to book them, and this is going to be focused around Normandy and Britany because that's what I know, but you can apply it to other campsites in France too obviously. France has the benefit of having an awful lot of campsites and an awful lot
of municipal campsites, and they've changed a lot from when I was a kid when we'd go to municipal campsites all the time but they're still brilliant. In fact, now they're even better. A municipal campsite is one that is owned I believe by the local village or town and it's operated by them, so it's usually very affordable – and a lot of campsites in France are really affordable anyway, especially the lower key ones, but municipal campsites are even more affordable. They've always got all the basic facilities, they used to be, just back in the day, just like fields in the middle of a town, but now they are usually way better; they've got toilets, showers, maybe a little shop in the reception, all those kinds of things. Sometimes they've even got covered areas where you can cook or little, like, common rooms that you can go in as well. So assuming you've already got your route planned out in France, at least, you know, your major route, and the first thing I suggest that you do to find a campsite is literally Google search 'municipal campsites' in the areas where, you know, you're going to want to stay overnight. That's always the
first thing I do because they're just so cheap and they're normally amazing but another thing to know about French campsites is that you're going to find a hell of a lot more near the coastline, so if your route follows a coast – or, in fact, like it's quite useful to plan a route that follows a coastline – you're going to do so much better for finding campsites especially on the northern coast so Normandy and Brittany you cannot move for campsites. Brittany is just campsites everywhere, so what I personally do is plot the entire route on komoot, break it down into stages, and then I look for campsites at either end of each of those stages and I do that literally by selecting 'show campsites' on the map which is a really easy way of doing it but you should always double check the campsites that you do see on there because some of them might be closed down, you never know, but a lot of campsites only have their listings on somewhere like Google Maps. So that's why I do most of my research there when it comes to actually finding and booking campsites that I'm going to use. So, you found a good-looking campsite but you click
on it and there's no information or maybe there's some really old reviews or really old questions on the Google listing and then you click through to the website and it's actually just like a random campsite conglomerate, kind of like curated list with zero information. This is a big problem with French campsites. Also, if you're trying to book quite far in advance, you might be trying to book like in March or beginning of April when the campsites are closed in a lot of these places because they only open for the tourist season in the sort of late spring. Summer and early autumn some of these campsites when they close their website closes too and their phone lines close so you literally can't contact them which kind of makes planning your cycle tour a little bit hard, especially in places where there just aren't that many campsites. Because of this I highly recommend that you keep your route quite fluid until you've booked all your campsites because you might end up in an area where you literally can't find any accommodation at all that is in your price range unless you want to go to a hotel or something. So for the cycle tour that I'm doing this year in Normandy, I've changed the route quite a lot since my original route and also I've reversed the route entirely, like reversed the ferries and everything which I had booked have to pay an admin fee to reverse the ferries and everything because I'm doing a linear route, so I'm starting off I'm arriving in one French town and I'm leaving from another but to the same English ferry port .So
I've already had to reverse my route because of campsites not being available at the time that I wanted them to be which perhaps I should have known given the sort of season that we're going in but this has only happened to me in Normandy and it's only because it's the D-Day beaches which are really really popular and so a lot of people travel out there before summer holidays start, which I hadn't actually factored in to my original plan. I'm used to going to Brittany where it is dead in June and it's absolutely perfect for cycle touring because you can literally camp pretty much in any campsite, you're never going to find one that's full, it's actually amazingly difficult to cycle ever so slightly uphill like I mean imperceptibly uphill until you turn around and then you realize that you're going downhill slightly, this is another disused railway path, line? Disused railway line, I'd actually forgotten how hard it is to cycle, think and talk and to hold a camera at the same time. I'm just taking a quick break to do that now so that's another thing that you need to remember do some research on the holiday destination that you're going to in France when you're cycle touring because Brittany in June for instance and probably the beginning of July are extremely quiet and it's really easy to just literally rock up to a campsite and they'll probably have space and if they don't if you're on the coast there's going to be another campsite not too far away that you can go to instead. Once it starts getting into the summer holidays there's so many campsites in Brittany that you're probably going to be okay but definitely still definitely book ahead if you can, but when it comes to Normandy it's got, it seems to have a slightly different busyness because of those D-Day beaches so in June especially around the D-Day Landing anniversary the 6th of June it's going to be incredibly busy. Millions of people go and obviously Normandy is another really popular beachy kind of place for tourists to go in the proper summer holidays like July and August so definitely book ahead and book far in advance as well if you're going to go cycle touring in Normandy in any time of summer but for Brittany, while I did book ahead most of the time sometimes I only booked one or two nights ahead and I found that in June and definitely before that then they're going to be really quiet and you can just turn up. Do bear in mind as well when it comes to availability that a lot of campsites do not open until April or May so absolutely check the opening seasons and if you're going cycle touring in March then 100% expect a lot of those campsites to be closed. So nice out here the birds
are just cheeping I can hear the river running it's in a valley so there's no wind, so nice. So back to actually booking campsites themselves, I can speak some French but it's not good enough to, it's not telephone French, let me put it like that. I can definitely do it in a campsite and uh make myself understood and be understood, that's fine, but on the phone absolutely not, I've never tried it and I never want to actually that's not true I have tried it once... didn't go that well. so it doesn't really appeal to me to find a campsite on Google that has no website at all no way of contacted them except for a telephone number because that just seems like a recipe for cringe if you're asking me, so instead I always go to campsites that have functioning websites and they don't always allow you to book online the best ones do like a lot of municipal campsites allow this too where you can actually see their availability and just book it online and that's really great they um that's the best scenario because then you've got documentation that you've booked here and you can see the availability and you know that you're going to turn up and everything is going to be grand and you can also book the right kind of pitch rather than having to try and describe your situation the fact that you're a person or people with a bike or bikes but failing that a lot of campsites have email addresses where you can book them and check their availability too when you're booking earlier in the year like April and May if you're booking somewhere like beach campsites in Brittany for instance then that's probably a really good way to go if they don't have an online booking function because you can just send them an email and they'll probably have availability and then they'll you know respond the French don't typically speak fantastic English it's not like maybe Germany and the Netherlands where like a huge amount of people do just speak fantastic English and obviously you can't go to France and expecting that either so I, I personally write all those emails in French and I will then I can read it for a start when they respond but if I'm sure about exactly what they've said which I do miss things often um then I'll put it into DeepL or Google translate and that will obviously tell me what they've said but if you don't speak any french at all then you can give it a go with Google translate as well like formulate your message in English and then use the translated version it's not going to sound, it's going to sound translated to them they're going to know that someone's used Google translate they're not going to mind and they will probably understand what you're trying to achieve at the end of the day saying hi can I book a pitch a camping pitch which is 'emplacement' but whatever it looks like em-placement in French uh you can learn a bit of this vocabulary as well and you'll just be able to pick out different words and know the right words to use but um when you type into Google translate I would like to book a camping pitch for one person one tent with a bicycle that's going to translate pretty easily it's not going to sound beautiful to the person receiving on the other end but they will 100% know what you mean they'll know you're trying they'll know you're from a different, I mean they'll know you're English for a start but they will reply in French and you can just feed that back through Google translate and you'll know what they've said it's all pretty straightforward I don't think that I mean my grasp of French obviously makes it easier but I don't think not having any french is a bad is going to be an obstacle for you because Google translate. `DeepL', things like that um I'll put the links below to deal especially um they're so good these days that I mean it might sound a bit clunky but you'll get on fine. Another
thing that's fantastic about French campsites is that they almost always are set up for cyclists, if it's a campsite where you can take a tent which most of them are but some are just for motor homes uh and vans and stuff like that caravans, they will usually have a specific rate that is cheaper than everything else for just uh cyclists and hikers so often you'll see that it will say um hiker which is 'randonner' I don't know how you pronounce actually but whatever um and then cyclist so it'll have the word 'vélo' somewhere in that um they'll have specific rates which are just for one person one bike and a tent and obviously you can then add another person onto that and it will be like extra four or five or something and those are typically in my experience between 8 and 20 euros night um for that kind of pitch depending on where you are Brittany is cheaper than Normandy it seems I don't know if that's because Normandy is just a bigger tourist destination or it's got a less of a coastline than Brittany. Brittany's obviously got a huge coastline so maybe there's just more competition so it keeps the prices uh low most campsites have those rates where it's just for hikers, cyclists with just a tent and no car like that's kind of the point and you don't get electricity with a lot of those either that you can usually add electricity on if you want but then you'd have to have one of these crazy campsite adapters so I don't do that um and I do have a tip for electricity like charging stuff in French campsites which I'll tell you about in a minute another thing that I've noticed that French campsites are starting to have an increasing amount of now or rather an increasing number of French campsites have these now is these little hiking cabins that I've shown in a video before and I loved it, I booked it for one night um when I knew it was going to rain and it was absolutely fantastic and I've booked one other one on this tour as well and it was like ridiculously expensive like €30 considering most of our pitches for this uh cycle tour are going to be like 10, 12 so this one is quite expensive at 30 but it's another like cute little hiking cabin they're called and it's so so amazing so look out for those as well sometimes in a nice little treat when you're cycle touring. I just turned around and I'm just streaming along not pedalling at all just absolutely flying and honestly it looks so flat you don't realize you're going up hill until you turn around I'm not pedalling it's absolutely amazing I bloody love this route I love slightly downhill uh so what I want to say slightly downhill railway lines they are the best for just a bre easy breezy cycle they're not good for fitness I don't think but they're I mean they are actually because it's a slog on the way up here when you turn around and you get this gift on the way back unless you obviously do it in the opposite direction and what it's case you're just going to get punished. okay so how I make sure that all my campsites are line up in the right order is that I literally open up all I find them all um find good looking ones in the right places make sure that there's a doable distance in between them and I check all their availabilities and then find a different campsite if one of them you know falls through and it doesn't have availability or something and then I will line all of those tabs up in my browser and I'm talking about a week long cycle tour here obviously this would be unwieldy if you going for much longer than that but and you don't always have to book so far in advance or so militantly I just like doing it personally because then I don't have to worry about finding a campsite at the end of my cycling day I know I can just turn up and it's fine so I literally find all these campsites find that they've got availability if they have online availability calendars if they don't I will email them first to check um but then when I've got all my eggs in a row and I know that they've all got availability then I will book them all in one go like I will just spend an hour booking up campsites um and making sure that everything works out well I found this is the best way to do it because uh you never know when a campsite might you know if you book two and then wait a couple of weeks you might find that a lot of other people have been booking their holidays and suddenly your route isn't going to work anymore especially if it's inland where there are fewer campsites but if you do find yourself in that situation look for the nearest town uh or even small city and just look for municipal campsites because they probably will have one um otherwise you might find gites or some b&bs will have camping facilities in their garden, some farms do as well so also look for camping farm uh so 'ferme' and that is the word for farm uh it's very similar to the word for closed um but without the accent or with an accent oh I can't can't think about that while I'm on the bike another thing I personally do when looking for campsites um and this is usually an areas where there are loads of campsites so along the coastline of northern France specifically although the coastline of western France will be the same um there like so many campsites you can really take your pick I look for campsites that have good uh access to supermarkets so I try and keep my cycle tours as cheap as possible when I'm in France and you can find out exactly how much I spend in uh on cycle tours in France in this video up here I guess that doesn't really work can't really gesticulate what I'm holding the camera so I never eat out when um I'm cycle touring ever at all uh I don't think anyway we always just buy food in supermarkets and then kind of just eat cold food really we eat a lot of baguette a lot of celery remad which is amazing um you know lots of like tabouleh, pasta salads that kind of thing as well so it really keeps the cost down but that means that ideally we want a supermarket pretty close to campsite within a few kilometers bike ride anyway and to do that I literally just go on to Google as well and type in supermarché and that will bring up anything knowing where these supermarkets are really helps me plan that route because if I know that we're going to camp near a supermarket then we don't need to stop at one before we get to the campsite and we can camp, set up the tents do all that kind of stuff and then we can cycle to the supermarket without having full panniers and being weighed down we can weigh ourselves down with delicious French food instead okay so this is finding French campsites adjacent but deciding what to do about charging stuff is increasingly a big problem obviously as people have more devices to charge like I've got my GoPro to charge my phone which doesn't have the greatest battery in the world and I use it for navigation then I've got my watch which I also use for navigation and and route recording in general and so these things can make you sort of feel like you need electricity I'm not going to buy or carry one of those weird campsite adapters that caravans have the main one is that I have a power bank so one of those little USB power banks so that I can leave it to charge in campsite toilets and stuff overnight uh where there's usually that's usually the place where you can find plug, plug sockets pretty easily um and I'm obviously not worried but I'm charging my phone in a campsite toilet so I'm not worried about it getting stolen not that I really would worry about that to be honest because campsites are so friendly in France um but no I would I charge my power bank there but also when I'm actually looking for campsites if there's choice then I will look at the reviews and the website if they have a decent one which they don't often have a very detailed one I'll look at the reviews to see if they mention like a common room because a lot of these campsites now have common rooms for hikers and cyclists and they might have a cattle in there they might have the book swap um and they'll just have some tables that you can you know eat your food at and things like that sometimes they'll have microwave and things anyway what they do usually have is plug sockets so you can charge your stuff there and I'll yeah do a combination of charging my actual devices if I'm there like reading a book or eating or something or charging my power bank and then I can use that to charge my devices overnight or whatever while I'm cycling so I really recommend um looking at the reviews of campsites to you see if they have those kinds of things if they have common rooms and stuff like that what a ride it's still sunny look at the river and the gar oh it's so beautiful anyway so that is how I find French campsites for cycle touring in northern France at least um and I know you can use the same tactics for the West Coastline as well but I'm going to leave that there now while I'm cycling because I'm almost home and my battery on my GoPro is seconds away from dying so I hope this was useful I hope I've somehow managed to show the UI of the map Google Maps find campsites all that somehow successfully well while I've magically been cycling this is a bit of a new thing but hey at least you got to see some real blue sky you got to see what it's like to cycle under blue sky and in sunshine for once I mean it doesn't happen often in my videos but you know I do try I hope this was useful and let me know in the comments if you have any tips to finding French campsites all campsites anywhere for cycle touring really like is there somewhere with that you cycle Tour all the time that has quite crap booking facilities um or have you tried to phone up a French campsite not speaking French and made an absolute ass out of yourself tell me that too I love to hear it anyway thanks for joining and I will see you in the next one bye [Music]
2024-04-27 02:49
