The Deals on Wheels

There’s camping and there’s camping – Time Out eschews canvas and heads south in a seven-metre motorhome.

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Camping on wheels, they call it – and they’re only half wrong. Spending two weeks living in a motorhome, as I did in France last summer with my family, is like camping in the sense that you are not holidaying in a castle or a gite or a rented cottage with floral sofas and too many corkscrews, but you absolutely do not – despite what any brochure might tell you – get to enjoy the pleasures of hot showers or ‘the comforts of home’.

You will poo and pee in the ablutions block with the campers and you will old-shower and shave there too. (The onboard shower and loo are just not worth the hassle.) Admittedly, you will do this smug in the certainty that while those toilet-block campers are heading back to a sweaty canopy, you will be sat around a nifty foldaway table in your ‘living room’ as your partner brews a fresh pot of coffee on the mini-cooker in your ‘kitchen’. Campers may pitch down next to you and may even offer you a beer, but believe me, your tarpaulin-inclined neighbours loathe you in your posh metal box. Both of you can go ‘inside’, but only one of you can climb on to the roof via the extendable rear ladder and, once it’s clear you’re never going to find the sun here, only one can escape the site on the banks of the Dordogne without hours of disassembling. Freedom – that’s what really sets you apart.

There are drawbacks. Gammon-faced Dutch families get to laugh at you as you attempt to reverse in the dark, through the trees and into a patch of grass that has the temerity to call itself a ‘pitch’, but these are big bad beasts, and driving one in a built-up area is a bit like trying to play Operation with the DTs. You’ll get caught out sooner or later. As for excursions, my advice would be to factor in the price of a small hire car for day trips (though, if you can find it, the motorhome-only car park underneath the ramparts of the fortified city of Carcassonne is a cracker – just remember the chocks). Or you could simply decide to stay put on site and enjoy your holiday.