Our 1000 mile drive to the Alps…how hard can it be?

Our 1000 mile drive to the Alps…how hard can it be?

Hi Richard and Jackie from early retirement wonderlust we’re currently in Ark 1950 in the French Alps and we have driven over 1,000 miles from Yorkshire out to the Alps and we just thought we’d share our journey with You [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] so it’s 10:45 on Tuesday night and we have had the longest day ever we’re sat in a beautiful little Park up in the center of DOA just behind the police station there’s a few more campers around it’s actually all right we’ve used it before and it’s a really quiet

Spot and it’s only a couple of minutes from the ferry in the morning so it’s ideal but today oh God it’s been like a war of attrition we left our house in settle at half 10 lot of it’s our own fault we realized last night that we

Hadn’t got any Euros in cash so we ordered some but we could only pick them up from the post office after 10:00 and we also Jackie woke up with having had a sleepless night worrying about we changed the van insurance and we hadn’t got a paper copy of it we’ve

Got electronic copies and we’ve got copies on our phone and our laptop but we needed a printed copy didn’t we well you do you’re supposed to travel in France with your V5 document and a printed copy of your insurance so we couldn’t find anywhere in settle that

Would do it and our prin is broken so we did call in at my mom’s on the way down in chesher um we also had to fit in a little visit to your mom yeah um with me going away um I like to see Mom before I

Go away uh so we visited her at the care home and that was lovely um never going to regret that but it did add a little to the day and also going and checking on her house before we went away as well which yeah I checked on Google Maps this

Morning and it said a thousand miles from Yorkshire to Bor San Maurice um and we’ve done about 400 of them haven’t we 403 to be exact yeah and uh it’s been a long day but what it does mean is that uh the next couple of days when we’re in

France are going to be not as bad so I think we’re going to turn in for the night and we might have a bit more energy to chat to you in the morning but I am absolutely broken so I’ll see you in the morning night morning it’s half 7even in a

Beautiful do car park I think the sun might even be trying to come out we forgot to mention last night um when we were so tired just how awful the weather was as well traveling down um known to us when we set off that we would be traveling through storm Hank and the

Wind and the absolute torrential rain that we had for about six hours of drivein yeah I think it’s fair to say we’re looking forward to after probably about two weeks of solid rain just getting out of the rain at some point and I don’t really care what other

Weather comes as long as it’s just not rain um one of the big questions that always gets asked when you are crossing the channel is what’s the best way to do it and we do prefer the ferry mainly because it’s cheaper and for me as a

Driver it gives me a break and then secondly you might be wondering why on Earth we decided to stay the night at do and not get a late night ferry across yeah we’ve tried it a few different ways um last winter when we went skiing we

Were on one of the first faeries out I think we had to be at the harbor for half five but we were just so tired traveling um through France that we just gave up traveling quite early yeah we had to have a little Nan nap at the side

Of the road at about 3:00 in the afternoon so that didn’t really work for us but now we talked about the shenan rules in one of our previous videos and if I can remember I’ll put one of the links above um but if we set off late at

Night then it actually uses a whole day of shenen which we don’t want to do it doesn’t really affect us for this ski holiday but it might affect us for what we do later in the year particularly in our long summer break yep so that’s it

We need to get packed up and the boat is waiting for Us You E So it’s the end of our first day in France and we have covered just over 300 miles and we are at one of the most beautiful little deserted French Villages seemingly in the middle of nowhere yep complete with its church bells uh we’re in a little place called

Pont LEC and it is just below Tu and we normally stay around this area because it’s kind of halfway between Cal and the Alps yeah and I can’t I can’t drive the full way it would destroy me and we were saying today the hardest bit of the

Journey is the first bit or all the way down to tuah which is from Yorkshire down to DOA and then across the flat agricultural lands of northern France it’s it’s tough going and today it was particularly tough oh my goodness we um got the shock of Our Lives I think we’ve

Been off the ferry for about 5 minutes we just about got on to the French Motorway the toll road and all our mobile phones just suddenly started pinging with alerts of really loud siren and there was a national alert for a weather storm War morning it was a red

Alert going through the Cal area so we just feared it was just going to get worse and worse and worse and it was pretty tough uh the driving conditions as you’ll have seen were not great but the toll roads they they keep them moving and they keep them clear there

Was a nasty smash the other way but um and then we seem to drive out of it yeah the other Advantage the tall roads although they’re expensive they come at a cost they’re really quite quiet as well in terms of a really common question people have of is it worth

Doing at the toll roads particularly in Winter um we just want to get to the Alps and we want to get there quickly and we want to get there safely so toll roads it’s just something you’ve got to pay for yeah we’re about halfway down

And I think at the moment we’ve spent 42 on tolls so I think it’s about 60 70 euros alt together so we’ve been reassured by one of the locals that we’re in for a very quiet night here because there’s less than 100 residents in the whole village and then the

Journey gets much more exciting tomorrow because it feels like we getting there and we’re heading towards the mountains now this is my favorite part of the journey because you can actually start seeing the mountains in the distance and you just get closer to them and it’s

Just stunning So the plan is to sort of head for ansy in the morning and then see where we get up to we’ve got an idea of a couple of really good Park ups that we could use um but it’s all weather dependent so we will see you in the morning bye bye W W Oh we’ve had a lovely drive down today it’s so much better than yesterday the weather has been been actually really nice and sunny and Clear Blue Skies we set off with the intentions of stopping somewhere just below ansy but we’re not there are we rich we’re not we’ve headed

All the way through to Borg s marce which was a bit of a surprise but as we sort of intimated last night the last part of the journey today has been so much better it’s been so much more interesting the weather’s been better we’ve been heading to the mountains this

Is always my favorite part of the journey the closer you get to anes and elville uh which is near the French Alps the closer the mountains get and the scenery changes it’s been beautiful so we headed down via dejon and Boron bre and then we dropped into Anese which was

Surprisingly crazy yeah we were going to go and have a look around the actual Center cuz I I love the town center of Anese but it was heaving and being in the camper van it’s not easy to park cuz a lot of the car parks are underground

So we carried on and we stopped off down at the south of the lake yeah one of our favorite happy places and it was just such a nice place to stop and take it all in and then we headed to a park up that we’d e marked that we’d used in

Previous years that’s absolutely beautiful but this year wow we’ve had so much rain and when we got there the park up is on grass but normally it’s still quite firm even in winter so you can stay and it’s a proper air but it’s an

Air on grass and it was like a bog when we got there so we took one look at it and decided actually we’re only an hour from Bor sarice I looked on the Camp’s website and they had pictures free so we’ve just dashed all the way down here

And actually it makes tomorrow so much easier you know we’ve just got a few bits and Bobs to do around town um and yeah we’re just then waiting for the kids to arrive on Saturday very exciting Well after traveling since Tuesday we have finally arrived and it’s Saturday night thousand miles just well a little bit over a thousand miles from Yorkshire to uh lazark 1950 and we have got about 15 minutes before the kids arrived because they flew into Geneva and we are

Beyond excited we are the apartment that we’ve rented for the week with the kids is just amazing um it’s better than anything we’ve ever stayed in before I think yeah and a little bit different to a camper van so after a good few nights on the road which we absolutely love um

It’s quite nice to get up here yes yesterday we had just a pottering day actually in Borg San marce we stayed there for two nights at the camping hopia site um we did a little bit of shopping and we sorted out our skis for the few weeks and then driving up the

Mountains it just got better and better a little bit sketchy with the conditions as you’ll see in the videos there was some sometimes when I did close my eyes just a little bit but Richie put the new tires on or we’ve had new tires put on

The van and um the difference they made in our confidence on those Mountain Roads yeah we’ve never driven up roads where it’s literally been cut out of the snow and getting up to the the height of a car so that was really interesting and uh we’re just so happy to be here it’s

What’s coming up in the next few days the kids are actually quite excited they um said that they want to do a YouTube day in the life of early retirement Wonder lost with us so that’s going to be good um if you’re not into skiing please don’t worry about it because what

We want to do is we’re also going to show you around the resort and show you what life’s like in the mountains in the winter um it is a beautiful place so we are going to do a bit of a tour around the accommodation that we’ve got here

And also the resort of uh lazark 1950 and the bigger ski domain that we’re in we’ve got a week with the kids and then they’re flying back home and then we are back down in the valley we’re staying at the Campsite in Borg San Maurice again

And we will do a bit of a contrast where we can show you a day in the life of skiing from a campsite where you have to get the finicula back up to the ski resort and more importantly we’ve got a good few weeks of living in the van in

The Alps on a campsite we’re really excited for it because it allows us to stay out here for longer so that’s about it we’ve got to go now because the kids are about to arrive bye see you [Applause] Later

We are about to set off on our epic 4 week adventure to the snowy French Alps in our VW T6 Campervan. As we are early retired, we have all the time in the world to get there, but 1000 miles from home to the mountains is still a heck of a drive!

Join us as we wild camp in Dover, find the most stunning stop over in central France and then have a change of plan before we finally make it to the stunning Arc 1950 ski resort. In this video we look at the channel crossing options, Schengen 90/180 rule implications and our decision to use toll roads or not.

We are Richard and Jackie and we live in the UK. We retired from teaching at the age of 51 in the summer of 2022. Our plans for early requirement include relocating to the Yorkshire Dales, developing our forever home and travelling the UK, Europe and eventually the world in our VW campervan Nelson.

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Many thanks,

Richard & Jackie