January 14, 2013

Brittany Ferries Portsmouth to Caen Day Crossing

Sarah Trivuncic French Travel channel crossings, old travel 0 Comments

About our Brittany Ferries Portsmouth to Caen day crossing – a companion piece to Brittany Ferries St Malo Night Crossing.

We could have gone for Le Full English but with another meal time due before the end of the crossing, bread and pastries were the order of the morning during our Brittany Ferries journey from Portsmouth to Caen.

Our family are seasoned travellers across the channel, we’ve done nearly every route and transportation means but Brittany Ferries’ longer mid channel crossings are our favourites.

Previously we’ve done Brittany Ferries Night Crossings, sleeping in cabins and arriving at St Malo the next morning. For this trip we had slept in a hotel outside Portsmouth and boarded “Normandie” before 8am.

We were en route to Siblu St Brevin les Pins; after the six hour crossing we had a further 3-4 hours drive to reach our mobile home accommodation.

You might think cabins are just for sleeping in but I swear by booking one during the day. They’re half the price they would be for overnight crossings and having somewhere to put your bags down with private bathroom is invaluable. We didn’t spend much time in ours on the way there although my dad had a 2 hour snooze on the way home.

St Malo crossing cabins include a television although for Caen crossings the basic cabins only have radios. Never mind, on this occasion we at least had a window.

There’s an entertainment schedule pinned up on a board, during the daytime crossings it’s mostly focussed at kids with someone dressed up in a bear costume, clowns making animals out of balloons, that type of thing.

The best thing about Brittany Ferries for kids is the soft play area and drawing tables. Ted drew this fabulous picture of the boat. In the restaurant kids get gift boxes with plastic toys supposedly to pass the time – although amusingly they’re generally unsuitable for use in a confined space i.e. plastic dart board, water pistols.

Restaurant options onboard include a snack bar selling pizza and sandwiches, a self service restaurant with hot meals and salads. There’s also a more upmarket buffet restaurant with table service although we’ve not tried that out yet as it’s over 25 euros at head and frankly the food is good enough in the self service one that I don’t see the point in paying this much.

The length of the crossing gives you a chance to relax and genuinely makes the journey part of the holiday. The time passes very quickly and you cut down on a lot of driving. Customer service onboard is excellent with friendly staff in the resturants and shops (mostly French). Both sterling and euros are accepted onboard however sterling works out significantly cheaper.

Best of all, when you get off at the other end, you don’t need to hire a car!

We travelled as guests of Siblu holiday parcs and Brittany Ferries. Read my review of Siblu at Les Pierres Couchees here.

Originally published on Maison Cupcake

July 24, 2010

Brittany Ferries Saint Malo night crossing

Sarah Trivuncic French Travel channel crossings, france 0 Comments

“Postcard from” is my occasional series of weekend non-recipe posts. This postcard comes from my recent experience travelling on the overnight ferry to France.

For peak holiday times, you have to book very early to get a cabin on the overnight crossing from Portsmouth to St Malo. It’s not cheap but when you consider how pricey a Dover Calais crossing can be during school holidays (£90 each way sometimes) and bear in mind the extra petrol costs, motorway tolls and an extra night staying in a hotel to break up your journey, actually the £200 extra you are likely to pay for the longer crossing becomes more tempting.

We’ve previously travelled on the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg. Big mistake. Driving down the Cherbourg peninsula is like going from Dover to Birmingham without motorways. It’s a long, dull drive. Plus you’ve only had four hours sleep on a six hour crossing (they wake you up at 5am British time, an hour before you get into port at 7am French time).

However the Portsmouth to St Malo crossing is around ten hours and arrives in port at 8am French time so you get more sleep and do less driving. It’s a win win situation, especially if you have a toddler who doesn’t like sitting in the back of a car for more than two hours at a time (less if hungry).

So with much excitement we boarded Brittany Ferries’ Bretagne en route to L’Ile de Re which would be four hours further drive from St Malo the next morning.

There are a few sights to see on the way out of Portsmouth…. HMS Victory got my dad rather excited.

The Spinnaker Tower and harbour side bars

I dislike planes and avoid flying. Truth is though, I’m not wild about ferries either. I guess I like my feet on the ground. Walking along decks like the one shown above and I have scenes from Titanic with Kate Winslet debating numbers of lifeboats running through my head.

“We don’t need a window” I told my husband.

“But Teddy could have looked out of it at the sea.”

“It’s cheaper to not have a window and we will be asleep when we’re in the cabin anyway.”

I hadn’t bargained for this. Rooms without views are not confined to the inner corridor of the upper decks where we’d stayed last time. They put you down there. As in, under the cars down in the hull of the boat. I didn’t even know that was possible. All cabins were sold out so we were down in third class.

The food lifted my spirits, I had one of these salads.

The desserts looked very tempting too.

My husband had fish and chips which admittedly looks like the meal from the Secret Nuclear Bunker post.

The photo of the chocolate-mousse-to-die-for is rubbish. Imagine though if you will, that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta tells Samuel L Jackson that “it’s the little things” that make Europe special i.e. the glass of cold beer in the cinema, mayonnaise on the fries etc. Well the little thing that I thought made these chocolate mousses special was that they were served in china ramekins. A totally unnecessary touch since they were in plastic pots as well but it’s these details that make eating on a French ferry company more special than the service station service you get from the British equivalents.

Off to bed.

“It’s rather nice” said my father, impressed it had a telly.

“It’s like a mausoleum, ” I replied.

The bathroom was predictably tiny but serviceable. It reminded me of the scene on the train in Sex and the City where Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall are travelling with Amtrak to LA and have a toilet situated underneath their shower.

So down in the bowels of the ship how did I sleep? Not very well. How much this was to do with feeling like I was in K19: The Widowmaker and how much to do with fretting that Ted would roll out of bed I’m not sure. It was extremely dark in there as well and there were loud noises. I was mentally calculating how far away we were from water and visualising the murkiness out there.

I wanted to go and pace the decks upstairs in my slippers, even if it meant dashing down a corridor that looked like another scene from Titanic, the one where Leonardo has been chained with handcuffs to a pipe and Kate dashes off to get help. But I couldn’t as my husband and father were on the top bunks and there was only I to stop Ted rolling out.

Which he did, with a loud thud, head first at 4.30am. None of us went back to sleep after that.

We will be travelling with Brittany Ferries again this summer, but not overnight. If I were travelling Portsmouth to St Malo again, I would make certain I had a room with a view as that was I could be sure it was above the waterline.

Originally published on Maison Cupcake