The Inside Track: driving to the French Alps for the first time

Nicola from the Peak Retreats team headed with her family to Val Cenis in March 2025. This time they decided to self-drive to the resort. Read all about their experience…

Why did we choose to drive to the French Alps?

This was the second time we had taken our children skiing. The previous year we had decided to fly with friends. But to be perfectly honest, we didn’t hugely enjoy the experience. 

We have done a couple of self-drive summer holidays so we thought it would suit us quite well. 

We enjoy being able to load up the car with ALL THE STUFF and it was great to take things like sledges with us as well as store cupboard items.

We find it hard-going carting kids and luggage through an airport so it was lovely to just load the car once and the luggage remained there until we unloaded at our accommodation in Val Cenis (bar one overnight bag for our stopover). 

Driving also offered much better value for money. Eurotunnel is offered in the package with Peak Retreats and then we just paid for fuel and tolls on top plus the enroute hotel. When we’d flown, we’d paid for a hotel at the airport the night before, airport parking, the flights themselves and then car hire which all added up. 

Finally, we actually quite enjoy the adventure of it all. We could be a lot more flexible with our travel itinerary and just go as we pleased. If we wanted to stop, we did. It was so interesting to see the scenery changing as we headed south and then into the mountains.

A real highlight was when my 7-year-old looked outside his window and said “Mum, I feel like we’re in the famous 5”.

What did we do to prepare?

There wasn’t a huge amount to do in advance. We did buy snow chains which we got through snowchains.com who were very helpful in advising on the size we needed for our tyres and they were to delivered to us for free.

We already had a UK sticker on our car which we’d had from previous trips to Europe.

We also ordered an Emovis tag for the tolls – more on that later.

There were a few other small things we did like putting on stick on headlight deflectors and making sure the car was equipped with a warning triangle etc.

Otherwise it was just booking our enroute hotel which you can do through Peak Retreats.

The journey

We did a bit of loading of the car on the Thursday evening so that we could set off sooner on the Friday afternoon. We took a half day from work on the Friday so we loaded the final bits and were on the road at 1.45pm (setting off from the south coast).

We arrived at the Eurotunnel LeShuttle terminal in Folkestone at 4pm. It was quiet so we sailed straight through check in then British and French passport control.

We then headed to the FlexiPlus lounge which was also quiet. Each member of our family was given a brown paper bag to fill up with all the food we wanted. On offer at ‘tea time’ was soup, salads, sandwiches, wraps, cakes, biscuits, crisps, nuts, fruit, yoghurts and dessert pots.

There was a wide variety of hot drinks and soft drinks available. By the time we were finished in the FlexiPlus lounge it was 4.30pm.

As we had booked FlexiPlus we were able to head straight to departures ready to hop on the next available train which was at 5.15pm. We boarded at 5.05pm and off the train went on time.

We had been organised and arranged an Emovis tag to make going through the tolls on the French motorways a little bit smoother. We ordered the tag in advance which we attached to our windscreen.

It then meant we could choose any lane at the toll booths and only needed to slow down to go through rather than having to stop and make individual payments each time. We just received a single invoice at the end of our trip. We will definitely be using this every time we drive in France in the future.

We arrived at our en-route hotel in Reims at 9.20pm and got into bed about 10pm. Everyone was in high spirits and our 7-year-old was excited to be sleeping in the top bunk for the first time.

We wanted to get up and on the road early the next morning so we set the alarm for 6am and set off at 6.45am. We were amazed to find that it started snowing not long after we set off and we weren’t anywhere near the Alps yet.

It continued snowing for several hours but other than a slightly lower speed limit on the motorway (down to 110km/h from 130km/h), it didn’t impact on our journey.

We stopped to refuel and get some breakfast at 8.45am at L’aire de Châteauvillain sur Orge. This was just a grab and go affair as we wanted to get a few more miles behind us before a longer stop.

We then stopped for lunch at 12pm at the services at Autogrill Aire de l’Isle d’Abeau Sud. Being peak lunch time, it was very busy. We thought a hot McDonald’s lunch would be nicer than buying a sandwich as we’d had a sandwich type dinner the night before.

It was fine but I will say, very lacking in vegetarian options for my veggie son. We ended up buying him a sandwich from the shop and he had that with his McDonald’s chips and drink. 

The children had a bit of a stretch of the legs and we were back on the road by 1pm.

Book your self drive ski holiday

Did you know that we are self-drive specialists here at Peak Retreats? If you're ready to book your self drive ski holiday or would like to pick our brains, call our friendly team of experts on 023 9283 9310 or email reservations@peakretreats.co.uk.