If you go to stay at a campsite with your tent or a caravan or a trailer tent or whatever - back to nature being the thing - the last thing you want to be overlooked by, or overlooking, is a large, white (and why are they all white?!) mobile home posing as a 'Cottage'!! With stuck on shutters with serve no purpose whatsoever - apart from making me even more angry!!
Now, don't get me wrong - I quite understand the advantages of a mob. home holiday (apart from being v. expensive) and all that - but why are so many campsites selling their souls and putting so many in. Are they more lucrative - obviously they are. Maybe our members who have sites in France can explain it to me? Touche/Floyd?? But what I'm asking is can anyone recommend campsites that don't have mobile homes in France. And there's the other factor of having enough facilities for the children... Ah - of course - they put the mobiles in to pay for the water slides!?
Am I being a pain in the ****? Is this now the norm? Note how long I've been a member and how many posts I've done.... too timid normally, but having returned from France yesterday from a lovely site (Ty-Nadan) in Brittany ruined in my opinion by the horrible mobiles, I just had to get this one out of my system!
Caroline xx
Don't forget to leave a review of the French and other European campsites you have visited!
Not many of the municipal campsites in France have mobiles - although some do. Camping a la Ferme is probably your best bet.
I would think that the reason most sites have some mobiles is that they know that those particular pitches are paid for for the whole season, and not just the days when someone with a caravan or tent turns up and pays the daily rate. If you're charging £20 per day (say) for a pitch, and it's empty for 50 days per season you're losing a lot of potential income. French sites are never as full as English sites - and except for the very high season it usually isn't necessary to book.
Try to see the positive side (after all there are a lot of people out there who don't like little white - yes caravans are nearly all white too - boxes on wheels which slow the traffic). Not all of us want 'back to nature' - for some people just relaxing outside their own little piece of heaven can take place just as easily on a site with mobiles, 'chalets', ready-erected tents or whatever. If you do want back to nature then Camping a la Ferme or Aire Naturelle is what you need to look for. These are much like our Certificated Site, or Certificated Location - although some are more sophisticated. Each has their own website - can't remember the web page name - and you can search for your own mobile free campsite.
Yea, Caroline, loved the rant. I'm in one group where they mark the rants like ice skating... I think that's probably an 8 8 :-)
We're not too keen on vast blocks of white mobes all in rows and do try to avoid sites with more than 1 or 2 British tour operator. Last year we went here: http://www.ukcampsite.co.uk/sites/reviews.asp?revid=5427
and there was a nice mix of touring pitches, Keycampers and privately owned mobiles.
We also went to a site near Paris (better not say which!) where they'd got 10 tour operators, half the people there were reps (at October half term) and the site had all the French ambiance of an average site at Skeggy. Oops! won't go there again!
Good sites do exist, the thing to do is research as hard as you can before you go. We have the Alan Rogers book, which seems to have a nice mix of sites & tells you what you need to know about tour operators and the ambience of the site. Though Alan Rogers is a tour operator too, ironically.
Liz
Don't forget to leave a review of the French and other European campsites you have visited!
P.S. Please write a review of where you went for UKCS, so the rest of us will know if it's the site for us or not. The more reviews the easier it is to research ...
Amazing family weekend with old steam engines, classic car displays, market stalls, and full catering and bar. And camping on site - Save £25 by booking in advance.
Topic: French sites without mobile homes...
