Family Van Life | France | The Best Campsites, Wild Park-ups & Places to Visit With Children

After an incredible summer on the road with our children, we've put together the route we took for family van-life and the places we stopped off at along the way. First country... France!

I've been asked a lot how I planned our itinery for France and the 6 other countries we travelled through in Europe

so here's how I did it...

I printed off a map of Europe and marked on it all of the locations we had on our travel bucket (For example Gorges Du Verdon, Lago Di Braies...) I then tried to join these up, making sure that the drives in between were no longer than 2-3 hours as that was the max amount of time I wanted each journey to be for the children. Obviously there were a lot of places on the north and west coasts that we wanted to visit -but these just didn't add up logistically with time restraints and our furthest southern destination being Italy. (We plan to do this on a separate trip don't to Spain / Portugal.) This was super easy to plan by entering our start location and our final destination on the AA route planner website. I'd then look on the AA route planner map at locations around the 2 hour mark, google the towns in that area and choose the best one. Choosing which one to stop off at was made simple using the app 'Park4Night'.

I have saved ALL locations from this trip and our 6 weeks in Scandinavia on my Instagram highlights. Give me a follow on @MotherOfGrom

This would show all of the wild camping spots in those areas and reviews/photos for them left by fellow campers that had stayed overnight in them. The reviews definately lured us in, and we stayed at some incredible spots.

If there were no free camping spots I'd book somewhere using the app 'Pitched Up'.

We stayed in some beautiful campsites that we booked through here also. Full video of our time at France at the bottom of this post.

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Below is our mapped-out journey through France which I hope will help you plan your trip. I pre-booked our first campsite as I wanted to ease our children into vanlife. They were already shattered from ending the summer term in school (especially my eldest who was leaving Primary School and had a million leavers events) and we'd driven around 5 hours from home by the time we arrived at France so this gave them chance to rest up and relax for a few days.